INSIDE COLEMAN PRISON, Fla. — In recent years, federal sentencing guidelines have been revised, resulting in less severe prison terms for low-level drug offenders. But tens of thousands of inmates who were convicted in the “war on drugs” of the 1980s and 1990s are behind bars.
Harsh sentencing policies, including mandatory minimums, continue to have lasting consequences for the nation’s prison system.
Today, prisoners 50 and older represent the fastest-growing population in federal correctional facilities, their ranks having swelled by 25 percent to nearly 31,000 from 2009 to 2013.
In state and federal prisons combined, there were about 246,000 prisoners age 50 and older in 2010, with nearly 90 percent of them held in state custody, the American Civil Liberties Union said.
Some prisons have needed to set up geriatric wards, while others have effectively been turned into convalescent homes.
The aging of the prison population is driving health care costs being borne by American taxpayers. The Bureau of Prisons saw health care expenses for inmates increase 55 percent from 2006 to 2013, when it spent more than $1 billion.
That figure is nearly equal to the entire budget of the U.S. Marshals Service or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, according to the Justice Department’s inspector general.
“Our federal prisons are starting to resemble nursing homes surrounded with razor wire,” said Julie Stewart, president and founder of Families Against Mandatory Minimums. “It makes no sense fiscally, or from the perspective of human compassion, to incarcerate men and women who pose no threat to public safety and have long since paid for their crime.”
The Obama administration is trying to overhaul the criminal justice system by allowing prisoners who meet certain criteria to be released early.
At the same time, the U.S. Sentencing Commission, an independent agency, has made tens of thousands of incarcerated drug offenders eligible for reduced sentences.
But until more elderly prisoners are discharged, the government will be forced to spend more to serve the population.
