Columbia Daily Tribune
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — A prison in Missouri’s capital now has a geriatric wing as state officials confront an increasingly elderly inmate population.
The “enhanced care unit” opened Jan. 1 at the Jefferson City Correctional Center, the Columbia Missourian reported. The 36-bed unit is designed as a miniature nursing home, a place where elderly convicts in wheelchairs, strapped to oxygen tanks or struggling with dementia can be segregated from the general prison population.
Prisoners older than 50 represented 6 percent of Missouri state inmates in 1998; 13 years later, that figure has increased to 15 percent.
State officials plan to open similar units in five more state prisons and eventually build a separate prison hospital for elderly inmates, complete with a dementia unit and a dialysis lab.
The rapid growth in the state’s aging prison population — as well as the overall prison population — has been driven not by an uptick in crime but by state sentencing policies, including:
- PA 1979 capital murder statute that requires convicted murderers to serve 50 years before being eligible for release.
- PA 1984 first-degree murder statute, which removed parole eligibility altogether.
- The 1994 Truth in Sentencing Act, which required certain offenders to serve greater percentages of their sentences before being eligible for parole. This act also imposed heftier mandatory minimums for more crimes overall.
Medical and corrections officials said that because of a variety of factors — including backgrounds that often include drug and alcohol abuse, high-stress lifestyles and a chronic lack of proper medical care — prisoners tend to age more quickly than people on the outside.
That’s why most state corrections agencies classify inmates as “geriatric” at age 50 or 55, the common age when inmates’ health begins deteriorating.
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