NYAPRS Note: Two problems increasingly challenging the mental health system in America—the aging of individuals with diagnoses and the criminalization of mental illness—are coinciding in prisons, as aging inmates’ health concerns are not being sufficiently attended to. Just as important as care for individuals when they are incarcerated, is ensuring access to safe housing and social services when an older inmate is released. NYAPRS will be tracking the Governor’s task force on this issue and advocating for proper rehabilitative care as we continue to look carefully at the effects of criminalization on our community.
Unkind Life for Young and Old
New York Times; Jim Dwyer, 8/7/2014
In a wheelchair, the 86-year-old man was getting ready for a parole board hearing to see if he might leave New York’s prison system after 33 years behind bars. It was essential that he express remorse for his crime. “He asked me to read the sentencing minutes,” said Elizabeth Gaynes, the director of the Osborne Association, an inmate advocacy organization. “He wasn’t sure he could remember his crime well enough, and was worried that he would sound like he wasn’t taking responsibility for it.”
Prison is no country for old men, or women, but in New York and across the country, nearly a quarter million inmates are age 50 or older. “Someone who is 50 in prison has the medical issues that would face someone 10 years older,” Ms. Gaynes said. The number of inmates 55 or older quadrupled from 1995 to 2010, and is projected to keep swelling, according to “The High Cost of Low Risk: The Crisis of America’s Aging Prison Population,” a report released Thursday by Osborne.
“You have about 12 minutes to eat, maybe 15,” said Brian S. Fischer, a former commissioner of the state’s Department of Correctional Services. “If you’re a little slow, or a little confused, 15 minutes is an awful short period of time.”
Arthritic knees or not, few older inmates are allowed canes. The flights of stairs at a prison like Sing Sing make it a difficult place for the geriatric convict to navigate, Mr. Fischer said. Toilets, showers, getting to doctors, keeping track of pills — all the challenges of everyday life that grow steeper with the years — become more complicated in prisons, which are generally built for people in their prime.
Those who live to old age generally have committed murders or notorious crimes. “They are not there for singing too loud in church,” Ms. Gaynes said.
But at some point, Mr. Fischer said, the goal of punishment will have been accomplished, and the prisoner will no longer be a threat; the recidivism rate for older inmates is about one-tenth that of other convicts. The cost of keeping an elderly, infirm person in prison is more than $100,000 a year, about double the average prisoner, Mr. Fischer said.
At the opposite end of the prison age spectrum, two other reports issued this week laid out harrowing pictures. In one, the United States Department of Justice charged that violence against teenagers at Rikers Island was rampant.
In the second report, the city’s Board of Correction found that people being held in solitary confinement at Rikers — many of them mentally ill adolescents — hardly ever got out of their small cells, even though they are supposed to have an hour a day of recreation. Fewer than 1 in 10 did, the board found. “It is common for prisoners to go for days without access to recreation,” according to the report, “Barriers to Recreation at Rikers Island’s Central Punitive Segregation Unit.”
To get outside, the prisoners had to be standing by their cell door to flag down a passing recreation officer, a process that began at 5 a.m. Prisoners in solitary are not allowed to have watches, so they had no way to be sure they were awake. On one winter day, seven of 10 recreation officers began their days at 5 a.m., two hours before sunrise, and finished at 1:31 p.m., with three hours of daylight left. Prisoners who did go out were taken to diamond shape cages.
“While the cages are empty of any equipment such as a basketball hoop and ball or pull-up bar that would facilitate exercise, this hour nevertheless represents a prisoner’s only access to fresh air and direct sunlight and only opportunity for social contact with other prisoners in adjacent pens and staff present in the area,” the report stated.
“This brief interruption of life in solitary confinement is particularly important for a population with a high rate of mental illness and instability and, as a result, one that is difficult to supervise safely.”
Rikers has as many inmates with mental health problems as all 24 psychiatric hospitals in the state put together. A secret study by the city found that 77 percent of 129 inmates seriously injured in altercations with guards last year had mental illness, The New York Times reported last month.
The board suggested logistical changes to offer more recreation.
For older prisoners, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has set up a task force to figure out how to help them adjust to a changed world. “Some come out with dementia that was masked — you can’t get lost in prison,” Ms. Gaynes said. Even so, she said, “I have yet to meet a person who would rather die in prison.”