Elderly Jailbait

The new mantra, from the right because it costs too much and from the left because our system of criminal justice just doesn’t work, is to reduce jail time, decriminalize some soft-drug crimes (or legalize marijuana) and take some cases – particularly where mental issues abound – into a different, non-criminal system. The notions of long sentences, trying children as adults and destroying lives with lifetime-job-slamming felony convictions are rapidly being replaced with more effective alternatives.

The primary emphasis of this movement has focused on the recidivist-plagued criminal justice system, starting in schools with youth programs and early-stage diversion policies. And indeed, we are jailing decreasing numbers of younger offenders and finding ways of getting them back into their communities earlier. Older offenders? Not so much! Seems Boomers are more likely to find their way to a criminal conviction as savings they have been decimated, pensions lost, and social safety nets fall away or provide decreasing levels of support.

“Over the most recent decade of state prison data analyzed by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the inmate population aged even faster than the graying U.S. general population. The imprisonment rate for people ages 55 and older bucked the broader de-incarceration trend by jumping a startling 71 percent.

“Adults younger than 30 in contrast were far less likely to be imprisoned in 2013 than was the case a decade ago. If the entire population had experienced the same change, states would be shuttering empty prisons coast to coast. This good news about young American adults is paralleled in other studies showing that they are far less likely to get arrested than were young adults of prior generations.

“Multiple factors account for the rising proportion of older Americans in prison. First, ever the trendsetters, baby boomers are somewhat more criminally active in late life than were previous generations. Second, the many state-level reforms designed to reduce incarceration were implemented long after the ‘tough on crime’ era in which many older inmates were given protracted sentences. Third, older convicted criminals by definition have had more time than younger ones to accrue long criminal records, which often leads judges to mete out longer sentences for a particular offense.

“Because prisons are legally responsible for providing health care to inmates, the aging of the prison population could strain their budgets despite the decline in the imprisonment rate. On the other hand, elderly, severely ill inmates pose minimal risk to public safety and thus are often good candidates for compassionate early release.

“The millennial experience of crime and criminal justice could not be more different from that of their parents and grandparents. Millennials grew up in an era of collapsing crime rates and as young adults are experiencing dramatically decreasing rates of arrest and imprisonment. If their experience is replicated in their children’s generation, the United States has a real chance of returning to the low-crime, low-incarceration environment it had for much of the 20th century.” Washington Post, October 31^st. One more nasty variable: if you are an elderly criminal having spent most of your life behind bars, exactly what does being released from prison mean in terms of survival and sustenance? Exactly what do you have to look forward to on the outside?

I’m Peter Dekom, and so many Americans are suffering from the pretty awful mistakes of prior generations who constructed this criminal justice system that seems to fail at every level.