"Old age in the big house"

Bill Cosby going to prison reminded me of this article:

As number of elderly prisoners grows, prison system creaks under burden of rising health care costs

As George Hall, who is 79, rolls through the halls in his wheelchair 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.

https://tinyurl.com/nre679g