For Prisoners, Life on the Inside Means Aging Faster

Confession time: I enjoy blogging on this page, but the sheer volume of the required reading is a nightmare. I try to keep up, I really do. Everyday I scan newspapers and blogs and star the latest reports and cases, all in an effort to stay hip. But our vast criminal justice system never rests and dozens of new stories of injustice emerge every week. The information overload sometimes makes me want to live in a cave far, far away from WiFi hotspots and 4G networks. Until that happy cave time, however, I just read compulsively. It's hardly right even to call it reading, more like information consuming.

So yesterday there I was, frantically consuming information, when the strangest thing happened.  My eyes were stopped dead in their tracks by a single sentence. I had in my hands a copy of the Vera Institute of Justice's latest report — It's About Time: Aging, Prisoners, Increasing Costs, and Geriatric Release. I had figured I knew the basic deal before cracking the report open. Long sentences plus harsh parole policies equal too many old prisoners. Soaring medical costs bad. Therefore, save money and let the geriatrics out.

Indeed, the report gave pretty much that expected story as I quickly flipped the pages. Then comes this sentence: "Although most 50-year-olds are not considered elderly, the aging process appears to accelerate for people who are incarcerated." I stopped. The aging process accelerates? Come again? I slowed down and read the rest of the paragraph. Apparently, the stressors of prison life — separation from family and friends, the prospect of living a large portion of one's life in confinement and the non-stop threat of victimization — actually causes the physiological process of aging to speed up. The consensus view is that "an incarcerated person's physiological age may exceed his or her chronological age."

It's a frightening revelation, the idea that the millions behind our society's bars are marching more quickly towards their deaths than those of us on the outside. Perhaps it's because I recently turned 40. Perhaps it's because my daughter is about to turn one. Whatever the reason, I felt I understood the phrase "hard time" — and its cruelty — as never before.

According to the Vera report, there are currently 76,600 men and women aged 55 locked up in our prisons and jails.  Even if every one of these individuals is guilty of breaking the law (I am confident that many are in fact innocent and wrongly convicted), I simply do not believe that they are collectively less human or more immoral than any random collection of 76,600 seniors in free society. The main difference, I submit, is that the locked-up folks are poorer and less white that their un-incarcerated counterparts. Hidden behind razor wire and tall brick walls, these folks get sick and die alone.

That's not right. Surely we can find time to stop and think about it — and act?

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