Seeking Justice For The Innocent

The Costs Of Incarcerating The Elderly

According to a recent Human Rights Watch report, state and federal prisons housed more than 26,000 inmates 65 and older. The number of inmates 55 and over is nearly 130,000. The director of the ACLU's National Prison Project, David Fathi states "The mass incarceration of the elderly is an example of our criminal justice system at its most heartless and its most irrational. Most such prisoners are long past their crime-prone years and pose little to no public safety risk." An example sited from New York tracked 469 inmates who were originally sentenced for violent crimes and were later released as senior citizens; over a 13-year period, just 8 of those former inmates went back to prison, and only one went back for a violent offense.

Click here to read the story in Mother Jones.