America's huge prison population and its aging society are not two separate problems.
 | By Max Strasser Sunday Opinion Editor |
A couple of remarkable demographic statistics: An astounding 573 out of every 100,000 Americans is incarcerated, one of the highest rates of imprisonment per capita in the world. Meanwhile, the United States' population is rapidly aging. More than one in every six Americans is now over age 65, a number that will balloon in the coming decades. |
We usually think of these facts as separate, independent issues that raise distinct social questions and require separate policy responses. That's wrong. |
In a recent guest essay, the journalist Katie Engelhart explains why. Earlier this summer, Katie visited the Memory Disorder Unit at a federal prison in Massachusetts. It's the first of its kind, but it's unlikely to be the last: America's prisons are full of people who were locked up during the 1980s and 1990s, when "tough on crime" was a bipartisan consensus. Now those people are getting old, and some of them are getting very sick, including suffering from dementia. |
The description of the Memory Disorder Unit is at times harrowing: old men who don't remember the crimes they are convicted of committing, living constrained lives in a fog of confusion. Guards placate their incoherent anger with distractions; other prisoners help to change their diapers. Is this the future of the American criminal justice system? |
Katie's essay doesn't offer any policy prescriptions. (In her reporting, she stumbled on a tragic irony: Members of the M.D.U.'s medical staff said that these prisoners "are probably receiving better care than they would on the outside, in whatever Medicaid-subsidized beds they were likely to find themselves.") Instead, it raises questions and should push us all to think. The Memory Disorder Unit, Katie writes, "seems to impugn the basic logic of the carceral system or at least its classic rationales." Is someone who is so cognitively impaired he doesn't remember his crime capable of being reformed? Is a potential criminal going to be deterred from breaking the law by knowing that he could end up as a prisoner with severe dementia? |
"In this country, we incarcerate way too many people for way too long," a doctor who works in the M.D.U. told Katie. "We give people life sentences. And then they turn 90, they're in diapers, they get demented. We have to ask ourselves, what are we accomplishing?" |
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