Guess it isn't enough that working folks have most their paychecks
stolen from them via taxation to pay for the elderly parasites on the
outside collecting social security, medicare, etc.

Do the world a favor and die already you worthless assholes.

Prisons face growing population of elderly inmates

Sunday, September 30, 2007
By SHANNON McCAFFREY ~ The Associated Press

Inmate Vicki Steele, 58, climbed into her bunk in the cell she shares
with two others May 22 at Metro State Prison in Atlanta. Steele is
serving a life sentence at Metro State Prison in Atlanta for murdering
her best friend's husband. She suffers from lupus. The state has also
paid for cataract surgery on both of her eyes and surgery on her ankle
and foot.

HARDWICK, Ga. -- Razor wire topping the fences seems almost a joke at
the Men's State Prison, where many inmates are slumped in wheelchairs,
or leaning on walkers or canes.

It's becoming an increasingly common sight: geriatric inmates spending
their waning days behind bars. The soaring number of aging inmates is
now outpacing the prison growth as a whole.

Tough sentencing laws passed in the crime-busting 1980s and 1990s are
largely to blame. It's all fueling an explosion in inmate health costs
for cash-strapped states.

"It keeps going up and up," said Alan Adams, director of Health
Services for the Georgia Department of Corrections. "We've got some
old guys who are too sick to get out of bed. And some of them, they're
going to die inside. The courts say we have to provide care and we do.
But that costs money."

Justice Department statistics show that the number of inmates age 55
and older in federal and state prisons shot up 33 percent from 2000 to
2005, the most recent year for which the data was available. That's
faster than the 9 percent growth overall.

The trend is particularly pronounced in the South, which has some of
the nation's toughest sentencing laws. In 16 Southern states, the
growth rate has escalated by an average of 145 percent since 1997,
according to the Southern Legislative Conference.

Rising prison health care costs -- particularly for elderly inmates --
helped fuel a 10 percent jump in state prison spending from fiscal
year 2005 to 2006, according to the National Conference of State
Legislatures.

The graying of the nation's prisons mirrors the population as whole.
But many inmates arrive in prison after years of unhealthy living,
such as drug use and risky sex.

And once they enter prison walls, they aren't eligible for Medicaid or
Medicare, where the costs are shared between the state and federal
government, meaning a state shoulders the burden of inmate health care
on its own.

Estimates place the annual cost of housing an inmate at $18,000 to
$31,000 a year. There is no firm separate number for housing an
elderly inmate, but there is widespread agreement that it's
significantly higher than for a younger one.

In addition to medical costs there are other, less obvious expenses.
For instance, elderly inmates can't climb to the top bunk so they
sometimes need to be housed in separate units that require more space.

State lawmakers have been reluctant to tinker with the tough laws that
are keeping more people in prison for longer sentences. Reacting to
violent crime waves in the 1980s and 1990s, state lawmakers passed
two- and three-strikes laws and abolished parole.

..