Releasing elderly inmates from women’s prisons is smart state policy | Opinion

California has created tools for prison release — including the elderly parole program in 2014. So why are so many elders still locked up in women’s prisons?

I spent 20 years of my older age incarcerated in prison. I’m now 79 years old, and spend the majority of my time advocating for the women I left behind: a woman with dementia who can’t find her way back to her room; a woman who struggles to balance her oxygen tank on her walker to execute her mandated job assignment; and a 94-year old who is forced to attend school, working toward a high school diploma she will never use.

Before I went to prison on a wrongful conviction, I was a health care professional in community mental health administration. While incarcerated, I helped my peers navigate a medical system that denies them basic health care and humanity. With the help of organizations like the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, I spent decades fighting for better conditions and exposed scandals like forced sterilizations, staff sexual abuse and deadly medical neglect.

We all have a stake in addressing the persistent problem of elder abuse behind bars. “No Time to Wait” is a new report co-authored by the California Coalition for Women Prisoners and the UC Berkeley School of Law Policy Advocacy Clinic, documenting how California’s practice of incarcerating elders in its women’s prisons is unjustified, inhumane and costly.

With dangerous prison conditions and skyrocketing health care costs, California must address this crisis — a relic of a bygone era of the state’s harsher sentencing laws.

Data from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation shows that re-arrest and re-conviction rates decline with age and are generally even lower for women. Fewer than 5% of people aged 60 and older go back to prison within three years of release. Yet approximately 740 people aged 50 and older remain incarcerated in California’s women’s prisons — costing them their health and safety and costing taxpayers millions.

Californians pay close to $128,000 a year to incarcerate a younger person, and two to three times that amount for elderly individuals. People incarcerated in women’s prisons are more likely to enter prison with pre-existing health conditions, and incarceration dramatically accelerates aging.

California’s prison system has a long, consistent track record of inadequate, neglectful, abusive medical care: In a recent survey of elder women incarcerated in California, 88% reported experiencing medical abuse or neglect. Instead of attempting to prop up a failing health care system, releasing elders would free up millions of dollars of funding for desperately needed social services.

We embarked on this research to better understand why elders are not being released despite all the legal, ethical and financial reasons to do so. There are several pathways for release, including compassionate release, commutation, resentencing and parole. But analysis of data over 11 years of elderly parole hearings shows that parole grant rates remain persistently low.

Overly restrictive eligibility requirements exclude many women over 50 from even getting a hearing. The parole hearing process is a rigorous one and includes several rounds of psychological testing, risk assessments and questioning by the Board of Parole Hearings.

State law requires that the board consider specific mitigating factors in elderly parole cases, like age, time incarcerated and physical and cognitive decline. But low grant rates suggest that Board of Parole Hearings commissioners are not adequately considering these criteria.

Prisons should not serve as memory care or assisted living facilities. The California legislature created a specific pathway for elder release and amended the program to increase eligibility twice in the last decade. The state’s decisionmakers clearly understand that the problem of elder incarceration needs to be solved, but the Board of Parole Hearings is not effectively using the tools at their disposal.

Incarcerating people who have aged out of crime is morally and fiscally irresponsible.

Jane Dorotik is an advocate with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, a grassroots organization founded in 1995.