Cellblock Seniors
By TAMMERLIN DRUMMOND
Picture an 86-year-old man clutching a walker as he shuffles down a prison hallway. Not exactly the usual image of a dangerous killer locked up for the good of society. Chances are, it's not what the judge envisioned either when he sentenced John Bedarka, a Pennsylvania coal miner, to life without parole for shooting his wife's lover to death 30 years ago. But Bedarka is still in prison at Laurel Highlands correctional institution in Somerset, Pa., in frail health, severely depressed and a threat to no one.
The number of elderly men in Bedarka's situation is increasing dramatically. With three-strikes laws becoming common and some states abolishing parole altogether, the ranks of these aging, sickly inmates will only keep growing--as will the cost to taxpayers. Because elderly people require more medical care, it costs nearly three times as much to incarcerate them, or about $65,000 a year per inmate. "Society has to take a real good look at this aging prison population and what's going to happen to them," says Fredric Rosemeyer, superintendent of Laurel Highlands, one of a new crop of prisons with geriatric wings equipped with oxygen generators and wheelchairs instead of handcuffs and stun guns.
About 70 miles east of Pittsburgh, Laurel Highlands is a prison and a nursing home rolled into one for people like Bedarka. For the sickest of the sick, there is the 85-bed long-term-care unit, staffed by 48 nurses around the clock. In a dayroom, half a dozen elderly men gaze at an ancient TV, mesmerized by Judge Judy. Amputees pushing manually operated wheelchairs queue up at the medication counter, where a cheery nurse dispenses pills for diabetes, heart disease and stroke. Nearby, a delusional man rants that State Road 31 is a barrier protecting him from the Martians. The demand for beds is so great that the prison plans a $23 million expansion that will triple capacity.
Other states are following Pennsylvania's lead in building penal facilities for the aged. But just how much sense does it make for society to keep these mostly nonviolent, broken old men incarcerated? With the U.S. prison population soaring (to a record 1.8 million last year), Florida and California are being forced to release violent felons early because of court orders to reduce prison overcrowding. Should these people go free while harmless wheelchair-bound geriatrics stay locked up? Statistically, the risk of recidivism drops significantly with age. "To keep some of these folks in prison for the length of time we do is purely punitive and serves no purpose to society," argues William DiMascio, executive director of the Pennsylvania Prison Society.
The plight of aging inmates has its ironies. In prison they have virtually unlimited access to medical care, while ailing seniors who have walked the straight and narrow often do without because they can't afford soaring health-care costs. What's more, inmates who have spent 30 or 40 years in prison frequently have no family members to care for them. Most states have limited halfway-housing programs for relatively healthy elderly ex-cons, but they can accommodate just a fraction of those in need. "We are constantly faced with low-risk, high-cost prisoners who should be moved into some kind of supervised release," says Jonathan Turley, founder of George Washington University's Project for Older Prisoners, known as POPS. "But there is no infrastructure in most states to accept large numbers of released older prisoners."
POPS, an innovative program that represents elderly inmates at their parole hearings and helps find a place in the community for nonviolent geriatric inmates, has helped 200 prisoners 55 and over win parole. Half were released to the custody of relatives. Others were accepted into halfway-house programs and church-run, low-cost apartments. Turley argues that states could reap tremendous savings by diverting just a fraction of corrections' budgets into post-release housing alternatives.
No one is advocating wholesale amnesty for inmates solely because of advancing age. Though many geriatric inmates are lifers whose crimes were in the distant past, a surprising 45% of inmates 50 and older have been arrested within the past two years. These older felons, moreover, tend to be locked up for more serious crimes, such as rape, murder and child molestation. Yet they're sharing prison space with people like Bedarka, who can't remember what he ate for breakfast but can clearly recall his defense against that murder charge three decades ago. "He threatened me," Bedarka says. "It was either him or me." Now, it's just him.