If a Nursing Home Isn't an Option, Try Prison

There's a parable-like quality to the story of Tyrone Gray Conway. A 257-pound, diabetic and wheelchair-bound sex offender, for Conway, getting out of prison — after 30 years — was the easy part. The tougher challenge will be staying out, and not for the reasons you might think, either.

Prison reentry is something we often talk about here on this blog. But for people like Conway, who face a motley array of crippling medical conditions, the challenges of reentry into society are heightened still further. Across the nation, the ranks of elderly prisoners are growing, and as the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports, nursing homes and facilities are often loath to take them once they're freed.

"In some cases, literally — not just figuratively, but literally — they do not have a bridge to live under. What are we going to do with those people?" says Keith Davis, the warden at Deerfield, the Virginia prison where Conway was originally housed.

And, in fact, Deerfield is where Conway's since returned. In Virginia, probation and parole officials have the authority to send people back into prison if there's no other way to meet their needs. So though Conway was released on Apr. 22 of this year as a free man, he was sent back again on May 5 — because no other place would take him.

Donna Harrison — a community placement coordinator with Virginia's corrections department — says she's tried to help Conway find a place to live for a year. She says she's looked at over 250 nursing homes to try and find a place of harbor for Conway, but to no avail. (Within Virginia, one issue compounding the problem is a lack of long-term beds available in assisted-living facilities that accept Medicaid recipients, which is the only kind of coverage most prisoners have.)

And in case you're wondering, Conway's case is hardly an outlier. According to James Sisk, manager of offender release services for the department, the state has encountered nearly 180 similarly tough cases in the past three years. Sometimes it's a case of an elderly prisoner having outlived other family members; other times, family members refuse to take such charges on.

In Conway's case, prison officials haven't been able to locate his family members at all. "Since my mom died [in 1991], everybody else stopped coming to see me," says Conway, whose legs are paralyzed. Meanwhile, nearly three months after he was slated for freedom, he still sits in a wheelchair behind bars, waiting.

Photo Credit: neovain