In his letter, he alleged that the Department of Corrections was refusing to give him medication for his various health issues, which included diabetes, hypertension, and hepatitis C. Because of the lack of treatment, Washington wrote, “My greatest fear is that I’m going to die more sooner than later.”
The graying of America’s incarcerated population is effectively turning the US prison system into a de facto nursing home, leaving hundreds of thousands of older people in its care each year.
The resurging trend across many American cities and states to further criminalize poverty and impose harsher punishments for petty crimes, including things like shoplifting, is partly to blame because the groups of people who become common targets for police are getting older.
“As Maryland’s population ages, experts fear that police will encounter people with dementia more often and without recognizing the condition or knowing how to respond to it,” Baltimore Sun reporters Angela Roberts and Cassidy Jensen wrote.
As former state Sen. John Whitmire told the Tribune, “Nobody’s tougher on crime than me, but once you’ve incarcerated a guy past the point that he’s a threat to anybody, I’d like to save that $500,000 to put him in a nursing home as a condition of parole, take that money, and spend it on either other public safety efforts or prison costs.”
“These extreme sentence lengths paired with narrow release mechanisms — meaning fewer ways to actually leave the system — led to this huge crisis of older adults in American prisons,” Eisen, from the Brennan Center, said.
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