Old age in the big house

COLDWATER, Mich. — It’s time for George Hall to come to the conference room, so he puts down his headphones and pivots his wheelchair away from the Brothers word processor he’s been using all morning to work on a friend’s legal brief. He navigates out of his room and into the antiseptic corridors, emitting a few coughs from chronic bronchitis. That’s the least of his health woes; he’s recently been diagnosed with prostate cancer and can’t walk, because of inoperable herniated lumbar discs in his back.

As Hall, who is 79, rolls through the halls with an attendant alongside him, he hears the soft cacophony of a typical nursing home. The clanking of walkers echoes somewhere in the distance. A man curled up in a bed lets out a loud snore. A group of friends erupt in occasional laughter as they play gin rummy in a rec room where one television blares the news and another a black-and-white Cary Grant movie. Some of the men propped before one of the TVs are slumped over, drifting in and out of consciousness.

This is a nursing home, yes. But it’s also a prison. Specifically, it’s the A Building of the 16-building campus that makes up the Lakeland Correctional Facility in rural southern Michigan, an all-male prison about 20 minutes from the Indiana border. There are 96 beds in the A Building, also known as the state prison system’s geriatric ward, a stretch of four-to-a-room “cells” that looks more like a dormitory in which the doors are rarely locked. They are all occupied by senior inmates struggling against the typical litany of health challenges facing men of a certain age. And for each man living here, another seven over age 60 molder in a more traditional prison setting around the state.

As feeble as they are now, each of the A Building men was, at one point, considered evil or dangerous — or both. They killed people. They raped women. They stole, they embezzled, they molested, they ruined families, they terrified and traumatized communities. And after prosecutors, judges and juries did their parts to put them away, the men understood they’d be “down” for a very long time.

But what that meant, in practical terms, eluded both the criminals and their captors — until now. Old prisoners are the fastest growing population in America’s prison system, which, it should be noted, holds more inmates than any penal system in the world. Tough-on-crime politics that resulted in more incarceration, longer sentences and fewer opportunities for release contribute to a corrections industry that operates in some cases, as at Lakeland, like an old folks’ home.

And those politics are now costing America’s taxpayers a fortune. In Michigan, a state that national activists and observers say is representative of the nation as a whole on this score, health care costs in the prison system have tripled in the past 25 years to $300 million a year, or 15 percent of a $2 billion prison budget that is also the state’s largest single expense. Across the United States, that spiral is expected to continue, alarming even many conservative lawmakers who must balance their passion for fiscal discipline with their belief in punishing criminals.

In an episode of the women’s prison drama “Orange Is the New Black” that first streamed on Netflix earlier this year, an inmate staged a hunger strike. The character, a 70-something excommunicated nun doing time for trespassing during a protest against nuclear power, tells the warden, “What are you going to do about the quality of senior care in this prison? The elderly are the fastest growing population in prison and they have special needs.”

Indeed, of the 2.3 million adults in state and federal prisons, more than 10 percent are over age 50, according to the National Institute of Corrections. A Pew Charitable Trust report asserted that the U.S. spends more than $16 billion annually caring for these aging inmates, and their numbers are projected to grow dramatically in the next 15 years. By 2019, the Urban Institute’s 2014 “Aging Behind Bars” study projects 28 percent of America’s prisoners will be 50 or older — and 15,000 of them will be at least 65 years old.

“The whole idea of prisons was to put away young, violent men,” said Jamie Fellner, an author of a 2012 Human Rights Watch study, “Old Behind Bars.” “Now we have this increasing population of infirm people, people who are physically and mentally not what prisons were originally designed to deal with. It’s one of the few issues I’ve worked on where everyone, from wardens to heads of corrections agencies to activists — we all agree: Prison officials do not want to be running old-age homes.”

How this came to be is the subject of a great deal of research. Some, like Fellner, lay the blame squarely on a period during the 1980s and 1990s when American politicians soothed an unnerved public by passing harsh anti-crime measures that included mandatory minimum sentences and “truth in sentencing” guidelines discouraging parole. Then–Vice President George H.W. Bush led the way nationally, scoring major political points in the 1988 presidential race against his Democratic opponent, Massachusetts’ then-Gov. Michael Dukakis, by pinning blame on Dukakis after convicted murderer Willie Horton committed an armed robbery and rape while released on furlough.

The result, it is often asserted, has been far longer sentences at exactly the same moment when the prison population was bound to bulge because of the huge baby-boom generation.

There is some evidence for that, particularly when it comes to lifers. In 2012, there were nearly 160,000 people serving life sentences in American prisons, nearly five times as many as were doing so in 1984, according to a report from the Washington-based Sentencing Project. Of those, more than 49,000 were sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, more than four times the approximately 12,000 with that fate in 1992.

Yet new research led by Shawn Bushway, director of the Criminal Process Unit at the University at Albany, suggests the proliferation of life sentences doesn’t quite explain the situation. Rather, in an analysis of data to be released later this year but provided in preview to Al Jazeera America, Bushway’s team asserts that average sentence length hasn’t risen but the median age of people convicted and sent to prison has.

“We think this is more attributed to the fact that older people are more likely to be incarcerated than they used to be rather than younger people are now getting longer prison sentences,” Bushway said. Part of that, he said, is because people who go to prison once are significantly more likely to return, especially if they’re let out with few good options for rebuilding their lives. “When you have so many more 40-year-olds coming out of prison than you used to, those ex-prisoners are going to be disconnected to the labor market because they got stuck in prison during their prime years. It’s really hard to start over at 40.”

In Michigan — which spends a larger percentage of its general fund budget on corrections than any other state, according to research by the Kaiser Family Foundation — the causes of the system’s senior boom is a mélange of these explanations. The Wolverine State had its own Willie Horton moment, a 1992 case in which a 38-year-old paroled rapist confessed to the abduction and slaying of four teenage girls. In the ensuing outrage, then-Gov. John Engler reorganized the state’s parole board, replacing corrections professionals with political appointees who embraced the mantra that “life means life” — meaning that prisoners serving life sentences with the possibility of parole should not be released. A Pew Center study found that as a result of these measures and the fear among judges and parole board members of recidivism, Michigan locked up convicts guilty of assault-related crimes an average of 30 more months per sentence than the national average between 1990 and 2009.

Haveman, the state representative who is bucking his party with his reform efforts, tried unsuccessfully this fall to push through measures that would allow many felons to be paroled after serving their minimum sentences. Still, he is looking around the nation for some solutions to ease the nettlesome, expensive problem of caring for older prisoners.

Two experiments that began in 2013 could provide some guidance. That year, Connecticut contracted with a private nursing facility near Hartford that accepts only former inmates. The state is speeding up paroles for geriatric patients in order to move from expensive prison care with no federal subsidy to cheaper private care that includes Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements. (While incarcerated, prisoners are typically ineligible for the federal health-care programs). By doing so, state officials say, they have realized $5 million per year in savings on security expenses and on medical costs. This arrangement is rare, though: Some parole boards demand a post-incarceration plan, but others grant what’s commonly known as “compassionate release” as a cost-cutting measure that can leave ex-cons to fend for themselves. 

Also in 2013, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation opened an $823 million medical facility designed to care for nearly 3,000 of the state’s sickest inmates.

Most states, like Michigan, are setting aside wings or buildings for older prisoners. Ohio has an equivalent of Lakeland’s Building A at Hocking Correctional Facility, which offers a program called “50+ and Aging” that includes such activities as chair aerobics, shuffleboard and bingo. Angola State Prison in Louisiana, the nation’s largest correctional facility, now has a hospice wing where younger convicts work as health aides to those who are dying and fellow inmates build coffins for the dead. In New York, the state has five 30-bed long-term care facilities within prisons; one is specifically for inmates with Alzheimer’s or dementia.

“Most of the people who have aged in prison and who are seniors in prison certainly don’t pose a risk to public safety,” said Nicole Porter, director of advocacy for The Sentencing Project, a group that lobbies state legislatures and runs public-education campaigns on criminal-justice reform. “There may be people who are chronically ill and who are medically incapacitated. There’s also probably people who are not medically incapacitated who have aged in prison who are well beyond their prime crime years and would no longer pose any risk to the public if they were released tomorrow.”

That may be, but parole boards and governors empowered to commute sentences live in fear of that one instance where someone does get out and does something horrific.

The logjam that is the parole system in Michigan is on full display the next morning about 150 miles north of Coldwater, where 62-year-old Oliver Hardy, convicted of armed robbery 38 years ago, waddles into the bleak, narrow room of pressed-wood paneled walls and an aqua-colored rubber-tile floor, shackles clicking at his ankles and cuffed hands propped in front of him. Hardy, despite his age and panoply of physical ailments including advanced arthritis, asthma and ulcerative colitis, is not housed at Lakeland but in the general population at Handlon Correctional Facility here in Ionia, Michigan.

Hardy, accompanied by three armed guards, is bald, wears oversized brown glasses, black boots and a blue-and-orange jumpsuit emblazoned with the number 151364, his prison identity. In 1977, he was sentenced to a “parolable” life sentence for the armed robbery of a Burger King in which he pretended his hand was a gun and made off, he recalled, with $277 in cash. In 1984, he was caught with a smuggled weapon in prison and sentenced to an additional one to four years, a confluence of events that left him unable until now to apply for parole.

Such public parole hearings are rare. Of the 700 parolable lifers in Michigan prisons, perhaps a dozen each year get to this point of the process, which is to say that a majority of the 10-person parole board took enough interest in releasing Hardy that an in-person interview takes place. Public hearings give victims a chance to voice their opinions about Hardy’s case, but today the three rows of chairs behind Hardy are empty. The only people in attendance are two parole board members, a transcriptionist, Hardy’s guard detail, Assistant Attorney General Scott Rothermel and a reporter.