Elderly felons need a prison break

RICH PEDRONCELLI / Associated Press

Debbie Coluter, a certified nurses assistant, assists an elderly inmate, with Alzheimer's disease, to his cell at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville.

By DAVID FATHI

Sometime in the 1970s, the United States began a love affair with incarceration that continues to this day.

After holding nearly steady for decades, our prison population began to climb as criminal justice policy took a sharply punitive turn, with the massive criminalization of drug use, “three strikes” laws and other harsh sentencing practices. More people were going to prison and staying there longer. By 2005, the prison population was six times what it had been in 1975.
One little-known side effect of this population explosion has been a sharp increase in the number of elderly people behind bars.
According to the Justice Department, in 1980 the United States had about 9,500 prisoners age 55 and older; by 2008, the number had increased tenfold, to 94,800. That same year, the number of prisoners 50 and older was just shy of 200,000 — about the size of the entire U.S. prison population in the early 1970s.
People age 50 or 55 may seem a bit young to be classified as elderly. Because their lives have often been characterized by poverty, trauma and limited access to medical care and rehabilitative services, most prisoners are physiologically older than their chronological age would suggest, and more likely to have disabling medical conditions than the general population.
One study cited by Ronald H. Aday in his 1994 article in Federal Probation concluded that the average prisoner over 50 has a physiological age 11.5 years older than his chronological age.
With 1 in 11 U.S. prisoners serving a life sentence — in some states, the figure is 1 in 6 — it’s no surprise that the number of elderly prisoners is skyrocketing.
In 2007, The New York Times profiled Charles Friedgood, 89, a New York state prisoner who had served more than 30 years of a life sentence for second-degree murder. Although he had terminal cancer and had undergone several operations, including a colostomy, he had been denied parole five times before being released in 2007. Friedgood at least had the opportunity to apply for parole; in some states, parole has been abolished and a life sentence means exactly that.
Being in prison is hard on anyone, but elderly people face special dangers, particularly if they are ill or disabled. Some have complex medical and mental health needs that prisons are ill-equipped to handle. Many prisons are not accessible to persons with mobility impairments; for them, bathing, using the toilet or even getting in and out of their cells can be a difficult, dangerous challenge. And older prisoners are more likely to be robbed, assaulted or otherwise victimized.
Some states have so many elderly prisoners that they have built special facilities to house them. Several years ago, I visited the Ahtanum View Corrections Center, Washington state’s prison for the elderly. Everywhere I looked were aged, frail, disabled people, some of whom could barely move without assistance. The prison’s Web page helpfully points out that a volunteer clergy team is available to assist prisoners with “end-of-life issues.”
The main justification for incarceration is to protect public safety. But it’s hard to see the public safety rationale for keeping so many elderly people in prison.
It’s even harder to understand the economic justification.
Incarceration is expensive — about $24,000 per year for the average prisoner, according to a 2008 Pew Center on the States report. Keeping someone over 55 locked up costs about three times as much. Given that criminal behavior drops off dramatically with advancing age, this is a major investment for very little return.

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Report indicates rise in number of preventable California prison deaths since 2006

A federal receiver in charge of California’s prison health care released a report Monday on inmate mortality. It says the inmate death rate has declined for a second year in a row. But as KPCC’s Julie Small reports, the number of deaths prison doctors might have prevented is up.

The report says that between 2006 and 2008, the death rate among California inmates declined 13 percent. But during that same period, the number of deaths that might have been prevented had doctors diagnosed and treated inmates rose from 44 to 66.

Clark Kelso, the federal receiver who spent billions of state dollars purging bad doctors from prisons and replacing them with more and better qualified ones, says it's not the doctors' fault.
"It’s not that we’ve got bad clinicians," Kelso said. "It’s that they’re working in a third world environment."
Kelso says there’s only so much those clinicians can do to improve care when prisons are packed to near double capacity, and when the clerks who file paper medical records are backlogged by months.
Kelso said the problem isn't that he lacks enough prison doctors somewhere, it's systemic failure.
"I don’t have health records anywhere. I have overcrowding everywhere. I don’t have facilitates anywhere," Kelso said.
The receiver’s review determines inmate deaths were preventable by noting when prison medical staff failed to follow correct procedures. Federal receiver Clark Kelso says one reason the number of preventable deaths is up since 2006 is that his office is doing a better job of identifying gross lapses in prison medical care.
One example from the report tells of an inmate who was diagnosed with asthma at one prison, then was transferred to a different prison. But the medical record that noted the asthma diagnosis didn’t go with him. The inmate had to wait two weeks to see a doctor at the new prison. On the day of his appointment, prison guards found the inmate “unresponsive” in his cell.

Release Older Inmates To Save Money?

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SAN DIEGO — Elderly inmates are among the fastest growing segments of California’s prison population. Inmates over age 55 have doubled in number over the past 10 years and will more than double again by 2022, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office.
Older inmates are two to three times more expensive to incarcerate then their younger counterparts because they require more health care services, according to the LAO.
Currently, California spends $10 billion a year on the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which makes up 10 percent of its general fund. If the state, under current sentencing laws, continues to send more people to prison longer, can it afford the costs of housing, health care, and eventually hospice care?
The state of California is under federal court order to reduce its prison population by 27 percent, or about 40,000 inmates, because prisons are so overcrowded they violate prisoners’ constitutional rights. Considering older inmates are statistically less likely to re-offend, the LAO suggests releasing older inmates to save money.
 
Would you consider releasing non-violent elderly inmates from California prisons?

Extreme overtime puts Cailfornia's prison health overhaul at risk

California's prison health care employees work hard – or so it would 
seem by their schedules.. Many average 12 hours a day; others 
routinely log 16- to 18-hour shifts for months on end, creating a 
costly overtime free-for-all in this budget-strapped state.

An abundance of forced and voluntary overtime has driven some nurses 
beyond human endurance. In the process, the long hours have opened 
the door for deadly lapses in a health care system just beginning to 
recover from decades of neglect.

"People who are pushing it to that level, working a ridiculous number 
of hours, usually crash," said Yolanda Esparza, a certified nursing 
assistant who works evenings and some nights at the California 
Institution for Women in Corona.

"I myself have witnessed people sleeping at their posts – heavily, 
snoring, full sleep. They don't even notice people walking by. It's 
pretty common," Esparza said.

Asked what happens when nurses are found sleeping on the job – a 
gross violation of prison rules – one prison nursing director said 
simply, "We would wake them up." Often, she said, the nurse is then 
sent back to work.

A Bee investigation found that lax recruitment, worsened by the state 
budget crisis, and programs such as one for the suicidal that's 
exploited by savvy inmates, have contributed to extreme staff work 
schedules. Correctional officials have tolerated the practice despite 
criticism about the price of prison health care, which cost more than 
$2.1 billion in the year ending in June 2008.

In 2006, a federal judge appointed a receiver to combat substandard 
medical care in California prisons. Clinics were upgraded, services 
added and wages boosted – usually well above rates paid in regular 
hospitals. Incompetent doctors and nurses were ousted, and many new 
clinicians were hired. Care improved.

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Source: The Fresno Bee