The Oldest Problem in American Prisons - Issue 48: Chaos
▻http://nautil.us/issue/48/chaos/the-oldest-problem-in-american-prisons
No prison demographic is growing as fast as the elderly. In 2015, there were 6.7 million people under correctional supervision (“more than were enslaved in antebellum America and more than resided in the Gulag Archipelago at the height of Stalin’s misrule,” Adam Gopnik recently pointed out in the New Yorker). And over 10 percent of them were geriatric (55 years or older)—a 400 percent demographic increase since 1993, according to a 2013 report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. From 2009 to 2014, while the overall prison population shrank by 3 percent, the geriatric prison population doubled. As 1 in 10 state prisoners serve life sentences, this population will only continue to grow. The trend poses both a health crisis and an economic crisis. Older prisoners come with a range of (...)