Theodore Sypnier, a 100-year-old retired telephone company worker in excellent health, is about to be paroled after 10 years serving his third prison term in New York State for child molestation. His daughter has asked the state attorney general to keep him behind bars forever.
"I don't think people understand what kind of a menace he is the way we understand as someone who was his victim," she told the Buffalo News. Sypnier says that, once released, he hopes to get to know the youngest members of his family.
Sounds weird, right? Public servant Marshall, frail and failing, headed toward prison while Sypnier, the sprightly pedophile, heads home. It's all on the legal up-and-up, yet the way we treat elderly miscreants often seems arbitrary and confusing.
Louis Lanzano, AP
Anthony Marshall was convicted of looting his dying mother, socialite and philanthropist Brooke Astor, out of most of her fortune.
One result: A major contribution to the crisis in our prisons. All across the country, they're bursting out at the seams, shattering state budgets. A large increase in the number of older prisoners has aggravated the problem, in part because they're so expensive to care for. And a recent study offers some more bad news: Arrest rates for older men and women have been soaring, so even more of them will be overcrowding state and federal prisons in the near future.
California is the poster child for the problem. The state spends $10 billion a year on its prisons, a tenth of its entire general fund, yet a federal court has found that they are so overcrowded that they violate inmates' constitutional rights. Prisons built to house 84,000 inmates now hold 158,000. The state is under federal court order to shrink the prison population by 40,000.
What's to be done? One answer seems obvious: Release a substantial number of those old people, in California and across the nation. But which ones? Can we find a way to screen candidates to make sure they won't simply return to their criminal ways?
A start has been made. The Second Chance Act of 2007 includes a two-year pilot project for the early release of some 65-and-older prisoners convicted of nonviolent crimes. The Bureau of Prisons began implementing the program this year, but fewer than 100 inmates will be included.
Many state legislatures have allowed the early release of a handful of elderly convicts. Other legislatures have shouted down the idea, insisting that criminals of any and every age should serve out their terms as a matter of principle and to keep them, for a time at least, from doing further harm.
Almost half of these older inmates were convicted long years ago and are still behind bars because of the public's turn toward "get tough on crime" laws three decades ago. Longer sentences for the same crime became the rule along with stricter parole standards.
States like Michigan, Louisiana and New York have been reducing those sentences, particularly those dealing with drug-related crimes -- in part as a way to reduce prison overcrowding. In California and elsewhere, though, legislators have backed off such changes in fear of being labeled "soft on crime."
Federal and state prisons now hold about 1.5 million inmates, and more than 200,000 of them are 50 years of age and older, double the number of a decade ago. Prisons consider inmates age 50 or 55 as old because their way of life, including drugs and alcohol, has left them with the chronic illnesses of a much older person. The cost of housing them is two to three times that of younger inmates.
By and large, these older inmates receive much better care than they did a few decades ago. Special sections for the aged and infirm have been established in many prisons. Some systems have built separate geriatric prisons, equipped and staffed to handle the elderly. In fact, older inmates who would have died early in the days of inadequate medical care now live on, adding to the overcrowding.
That is not to suggest that prison life is pleasant for aging inmates. I saw that firsthand some years ago at a maximum-security prison in New Jersey. "As horrible as life is in a maximum security prison," a corrections official told me, "growing old there is worse."
The prison routine and the physical layout -- bunk beds, for example -- were difficult enough for elderly people with high blood pressure or diabetes who are losing their sight, their hearing and their balance; falls were frequent.
Older prisoners spoke of their constant fear of the younger inmates who would trample them in the rush toward the dining hall or the rec room, steal their cigarettes or other valuables, force them to hide drugs or other contraband, attack them in the showers. The prison had created a safe space for 16 old prisoners where they ate, played cards and slept dormitory style.
That unit has since been enlarged as the prison's over-50 population has risen from 193 to 300, but there's room now for only 48 inmates -- and the age requirement has been raised from 50 to 55 and is headed toward 60. There's a long waiting list.
And it looks like it will be getting longer. So says Ronald H. Aday, a professor at Middle Tennessee State University who found that the number of arrests of people 50 and older rose 39 percent from 1998 to 2007.
All sorts of reasons have been offered for that outsize change including the coming of age of the baby boomers, though the group's growth rate over those years was just 11 percent. Others point to hard economic times as a motivating factor, though the recession didn't hit in force until 2008. Also, today's crooks are healthier and stronger into their later years and less apt to age-out of their criminal careers.
Whatever the cause or combination of causes, more older men and women are headed for our overcrowded prisons, and advocates of two possible solutions to overcrowding -- the release of safe, elderly prisoners and the loosening of stringent sentencing laws -- are fighting an uphill battle.
