Ageing in Prison

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It is also expensive. Dr. Fred Vohr, medical program director of the Adult Correctional Institutions (ACI), says that estimates of the medical costs for older prisoners range from 100 to several hundred percent higher than their younger counterparts. Many elderly inmates are the byproducts of Draconian drug and truth-in-sentencing laws passed with great gusto in the 1980s and 1990s. And for at least a decade, human rights and inmate advocates have been warning that their mushrooming presence will strain prison budgets to the point of compromising their care, in contradiction to their threat to public safety and the demands of justice.

“Politicians don’t get points pressing for people to get out of prison; parole boards still worry that something could happen after release, and we still have a punitive culture,” says Jamie Fellner, senior adviser for Human Rights Watch’s United States program.

Contrary to Pelletier’s observation that regular meals and bedtimes minus alcohol and drugs arrest one’s physical decline, experts say that prison is no anti-aging prescription.

“An inmate’s physical age is ten years above their biological age,” says Barry Weiner, assistant director for rehabilitative services at the Rhode Island Department of Corrections. “A lot of folks had poor health care or a lack of health care, and they come to us with greater medical challenges than another person of that age — chronic diabetes, heart disease, osteoporosis, dementia, cancers.”