LIFE SENTENCE
Older inmates are packing U.S. prisons and colouring them with shades of gray
Foreword from the book Prisoners of Age (2000):
http://www.prisonersofage.com/home
Photos by Ron Levine
Text by David Winch
“My prison is becoming a old folks home”
— Warden of 3,000-prisoner Angola state penitentiary in Louisiana
I was young and crazy,” recalls Roland Cam, who is now aged 82. “I shot a women; killed her. That put me in here. I had the devil in me … I wouldn’t do nothing like that now.”
The words of the elderly North Carolina prisoner are spoken with regret, but also with a rueful resilience. They sound off-key; old men and jail cells just don’t mix. But in the United States today, they have to: elderly prisoners are a booming part of the prison population. Throughout the U.S., from massive, hard-time Southern prisons to campus-like low-security facilities in the North complete with geriatric wards, “old cons” are proliferating.
Old men behind bars don’t generate any of prison’s violent glamor — like convict icons played by Paul Newman, Edward G. Robinson or Marlon Brando — who do every kind of somersault to get out of Sing Sing or Alcatraz or Southern chain gangs and to get back to real life. Nor are they usually the angry men who clang cups on their bars, raising hell and seething with resentment and violence.
Older prisoners are, on average, more like Roland Cam — reflective, quiet, with all the big events in their lives safely in the past. The McCain Correctional Hospital , a geriatric prison in rural North Carolina, is full of Roland Cams. And soon, much of the U.S. prison system will be, too. Seniors are quietly invading American prisons in wheelchairs and on crutches, wearing white smocks and tied to their IV drips.
The new geriatric prisons they live in are different, too. They should be — these prisoners do not fit the crime-novel clich‚ of raw-edged young toughs pacing their cells like caged tigers, counting out the days and the years until their release, impatiently killing time till they can get out on the street again.
Toothless tigers
Old cons are more like toothless tigers: declawed, dazed, sometimes pathetic. But they can show sparks of the old spirit, like the somehow irrepressible prisoners who escaped from one Alabama jail, and got as far as their legs would carry them. Then they gave in to physical exhaustion — two blocks from their cells. “They called me from the local hospital, and said, We got some of your boys’,” recalled the warden. “They done run out of breath.”
Men in their 60s, 70s and 80s who are imprisoned — often hospitalized, really — evoke sympathy, even pity, in a way younger prisoners just can’t. They also bring a whole new range of complaints and grievances to bear, like the McCain convict whose appeal is based on his inability to wear his hearing aid in court: “I couldn’t make out a word,” he protests, recalling his bizarrely soundless trial.
This wave of older prisoners has begun to overwhelm traditional facilities like the Angola state maximum security facility in Louisiana where in 1995, for the first time, more inmates died than were paroled. To cope with the change, a new generation of specialized prisons has grown up, as far afield as Oregon, Pennsylvania, Alabama, North Carolina and Canada. One of the most prominent is in Hamilton, Alabama.
With the grandfatherly air of a weekend putterer, Thurman Jetton shows off his garden to visitors. Bright floral colors shoot up in every direction as marigolds, petunias, old maids and zinnias all blossom in the scorching Alabama sun. Jetton, dressed in a white work outfit, leans back on his heels and strikes a backpockets-casual pose, while his ragged grey eyebrows and lively eyes give him a sheepish, somewhat mischievous look. In his smoky Southern drawl, Jetton describes his handiwork with obvious pride.
“Bad drunk”
The affable gardener’s floral tapestry hardly suggests the hand of a murderer. But at age 66, Thurman Jetton is in his 16th year in jail and, as he readily recounts, in a tone as lively as the one he uses to talk about his garden, he earned his sentence.
“Well,” he recalls, matter-of-factly, ” I took up with a man’s wife,” and in chain of events as predictable as any country music melody, her husband soon found out and she fluttered back to him. Jetton, “bad drunk”, grew enraged. “Me and him got to arguing. I brought out the ball bat. She’s lying on the bed, and I grab the ball bat to kill him — no use denying that — I’m goin’ to kill him. Just as I swing at him, she run out between me and him and I caught her right there,” he concludes, pointing to his forehead: “Killed her deader than a doornail.”
Now Thurman Jetton faces old age in prison, an existence marked out by parole hearings leading like highway signs to a territory on the edge of life and death, freedom and despair. So while the local Wal-Mart in Hamilton, Alabama, sprawls invitingly just beyond his garden fence, Jetton will never be able to amble over to pick up a hoe or some fertilizer. If he did, his every move would be followed through the sights of a Smith & Wesson 10-gauge shotgun trained on him from a nearby watchtower. An infinite distance separates him from a “normal” retirement.
Jetton is not alone in this predicament: while the average age of convicts in U.S. federal facilities is just 37, reports the federal Bureau of Prisons, there were 50,000 prisoners aged over 50 in the mid-1990s, out of about 1 million inmates. That total has continued to grow as a steady 5 to 7 percent of the inmate population. Some projections foresee more than 125,000 older prisoners in the early 2000s, as the U.S. prisoner population surges toward 2 million. Similarly, in Canada, despite a drastically smaller prison population, the trend is obvious: a recent report by the federal Correctional Service noted that the rise of older prison inmates nationally in the mid-1990s was almost “10 times” that of younger offenders.
Three strikes
In the U.S., the effect of longer sentences and three-strikes’ laws, which mandate life sentences for third offences, will almost certainly keep this number growing. These laws deny judges and juries the right the fix sentences that are elastic — depending on a prisoner’s behaviour and prison conditions. Instead, they impose mandatory life sentences on third convictions. This can mean that a 45-year-old murderer or rapist will almost certainly spent his next 30-plus years in prison, with no possibility of release. If it is his third conviction, even lesser crimes will carry this life sentence. And since the number of convictions is increasing rapidly, the length of sentences may lead to an elephant-in-the-boa phenomenon of a large wave pushing through the system. This could hugely inflate the number of older prisoners.
The costs of this crime-fighting approach are, by all accounts, very high. An average inmate costs taxpayers $20,000 a year to keep in prison. Meanwhile, a geriatric prisoner, with all the complex medical facilities and personal care that become necessary, costs closer to $60,000 a year.
What is that buying? For this growing minority of seniors, old age is not about long walks, waiting patiently for the mail and pension check to come, much less rounds of golf in Florida or Arizona. Instead, it revolves around iron bars, annual pleas to the parole board and endless cellblock hours in prison whites like those Jetton wears, loudly stencilled in black: “Department of Corrections”.
Hamilton is a small, plain-looking town in northwest Alabama, with a small suburban strip of McDonald’s and shopping malls at the town’s edge. It seems an odd spot for one of the pioneering U.S. prison facilities for seniors. The full name is the Hamilton Institute for the Aged and Infirm, or Hamilton A.& I., but inmates scornfully refer to it as “Hamilton Lay and Die”, for its odd mix of nursing home dreariness and barbed-wire limits. A low-rise former mental-health facility, Hamilton A.& I. is ringed by high fences that most prisoners could not hope to climb, and ominous-looking guard towers.
Physically and psychologically, only this barrier separates the Hamilton prison from the Sunset Home nursing residence across the street. The facility was designed to house prisoners who are older or who require more medical attention. Today, Hamilton A.&I.’s inmate population of 255 also includes many younger inmates, some in their early 20s — they do the hospital lifting, maintenance and kitchen work — as well as handicapped and soon-to-be-released prisoners.
Inside Hamilton, the traditional prison culture of tattoos and tough guys mixes uneasily with a geriatric-oriented nursing wing filled with IV drips and bedridden inmates. For first lunch call at 11 a.m., a ragged queue studded with wheelchairs, walkers, crutches and canes crowds together near the dining hall, evoking not so much a hard-knocks Southern prison as it does the waiting room at Lourdes.
Explosive disputes
Like virtually every prison in the U.S., its population offers a cross-section of working-class males. Plenty of truck drivers and longshoremen, day laborers and farm workers, men who the Census likes to describe as “unskilled”.
A busy nursing station straddles the heart of the facility (“INMATES ARE NOT TO KNOCK ON OR LOOK IN THIS DOOR”) to care for elderly prisoners like Leon Davis, a wheelchair-bound 69-year-old. Davis was already handicapped in 1987 — he suffered the amputation of both feet following diabetes in 1979 — when he unloaded a .357 Magnum at his girlfriend. With surgical precision, he describes the four shots (“one near the heart, two in the stomach and one in the groin”) that he fired after an explosive series of disputes with her. She survived. Davis got 25 years for attempted murder. Reflecting on their fates, Davis concludes, “She got disability, I got time.”
A charming and affable black man with a deep rum Alabama accent , Davis praises the medical attention he receives at Hamilton. “It’s easier in a wheelchair here” than in the hard-time maximum security prisons he had been in previously, says Davis. There, older prisoners are routinely victimized by younger ones. Still, he still finds Hamilton’s mix of old and young prisoners, mentally unstable and low-risk inmates a bit unsettling.
“They bring crazy folks in,” complains Davis, adding, “When I see a fella, if he talks crazy, I don’t have nothin’ to do with him. But the young fellas, I’m glad they’re here. Don’t none of em give me no problems.” On a philosophical note, Davis reflects on the dilemma of old men in prison: “At 65 or 70, a man’s life is just about over with. It’s hard to stay here without gettin’ mixed up. I got to look up my family; don’t know where bout half of them is. I’m not coming back to prison; I’m too old. I’m just tryin’ to get straight with God.”
We make an emotional trade-off with young prisoners: they may be locked into a rough situation but, hey, they deserved it. Convicts may have had bad childhoods, rough lives, a hard-knocks upbringing, but we cannot let ourselves think about that: we have to protect ourselves. Better for them to be in there than out here threatening our children, we conclude. We fear them and want to punish them, and above all to control and restrain them. They may be underdogs, but they are dangerous underdogs. They personify a looming menace, the physical threat of strong young men. Apprehension, anxiety, flat-out fear — these reactions are often at the core of our attitudes toward lawbreakers in their 20s and 30s.
With old men behind bars, it’s different. Despair, sorrow and bitterness predominate.
Pity, bathos and futility
Older prisoners evoke a new spectrum of emotions: pity, bathos, and even a sense of the comic futility of some of misadventures that landed them in prison at — what!?! — 62 years of age.
Harsher penalties aside , a jarring fact is that many “old cons” are in jail today for crimes they committed when they were already in their late 50s, 60s, and even 70s: sexual abuse, assault, fraud, vehicular homicide, major property crimes, first-degree murder. While some senior inmates are veteran convicts with a string of sentences stretching back to their teens and 20s, others are old men who were first convicted of serious crimes when they were already past retirement age. Jonathan Turley, a Washington D.C. law professor who deals with older prisoners, calls these offenders the “late bloomers and overachievers” of the criminal class.
In Canada, where several seniors-oriented facilities have sprung up, one federal study confirms that, far from being simply the victims of longer sentences, “50 percent of older prisoners are first-time offenders”. These convictions are, moreover, overwhelmingly for violent and sex-related offences. While quiet, elder prisoners usually have a calming effect on the general prisoner population, they are also subject to temper and emotional outbursts that can lead to crimes of passion: “loss of inhibitions [result] in aggression, quarrelsomeness, rigidity and illegal sexual behavior, such as exhibitionism,” concluded the Canadian report. The authors speculate, quoting recent medical research, that changes in brain chemistry may result in a loss of inhibitions in some people as they age. This can lead to unexpected rages that prompt a law-abiding adult to suddenly commit a first crime even as they approach or pass retirement age.
Neither fish nor fowl
Older prisoners, then, are neither fish nor fowl: they occupy a gray area. Their situation is usually no longer obviously threatening, but they remain behind bars. They are often the victims of fierce persecution and picking-on by younger prisoners. As a result, the new institutions that are being designed to house them are more like nursing homes than prisons. Medical care and medium-to-low security environments replace the walls of traditional penitentiaries.
Hamilton warden W.C. Berry, a burly tobacco-chewing Alabaman with a poster of his beloved Crimson Tide college football dynasty dominating the office wall, speaks slowly but firmly about the predicament of old men in prison. “Protecting society” is the key role of prisons, says Berry, a likable man whose skepticism about “rehabilitation” leads him to argue that many old convicts “are not going to change.” While they may look pathetic behind bars in wheelchairs and the incarceration of a seniors’ prison can seem excessive, Berry underlines cases in which murders or sexual abuses were committed by handicapped or gravely ill seniors. He warns against the natural impulse to treat decrepit-looking older prisoners as if they were incapable of harming anyone.
“The recidivism rate is huge,” stresses Berry, “particularly for sex offenses.”
Berry realizes, moreover, that a well-adapted prison like Hamilton is far better than an offender will find elsewhere. His files bulge with letters from senior prisoners at traditional, tougher state facilities, often virtually begging to be transferred to Hamilton, where they hope that they will not be victimized by gangs of younger convicts.
Dean of prisoners
Given their senescence, do older, sick or bedridden inmates belong in jail? As one 65-year-old at McCain Correctional Institute asks, wearily: “How do I go about getting a time cut?” Is there really a need to protect society with iron bars from a convict like Otis Wyatt?
Wyatt, 84, is one of the “deans” of prisoners at Hamilton A.&I. The wheelchair-bound inmate has a slight shock of wild grey hair, bracketed by white eyebrows and protruding ears. Much of his time is spent in the main prison common area, hunched over, reading, while other prisoners languidly watch TV. In the last months of his conviction for sexually molesting a girl (“I didn’t do it”), Wyatt is preparing for release, hopefully before he is 85. With the end of the tunnel in view, Wyatt freely blasts prison life: “Damned right I’ll be glad to get out of here.”
Looking to life beyond the bars, the cantankerous Wyatt offers his views straight-up. He doesn’t like the blend of young and old at Hamilton: “You got all kinds mixed up; I got nothing to do with the young ones.” He slams the medical service for “neglecting” the chronic pain in his leg: “They don’t give you nothin’ more than Tylenol . . . You’d be dead before the doctor would see you.” As for the guards, Wyatt is bracing: “They’re strict, even on the old guys. The officers are hell on you. They’re always trying to get you to take a bath!” In a conspiratorial tone, as if informing a human-rights monitor, he confides, “And even if you’ve had a bath, they make you take a second one! ”
The American Civil Liberties Union, prison reformers and “critical criminologists” — decried by some conservatives as the penological left-wing — argue that prisoners like Otis Wyatt should be treated in hospital-like wards. There, they would be much freer to come and go. It is far less expensive, and a much better use of detention space at a time when convictions are soaring, to release prisoners when they pass the “criminal menopause” age that criminologists have tried to define.
The Sentencing Project, a prisoner advocacy and justice group, points out that 66 percent of persons arrested are under age 30. It concludes that “since crime rates for most offenses drop sharply after age 30, 3 strikes and you’re out’ [laws] will result in imprisoning a group of offenders for life who might be more appropriately sentenced to shorter terms of imprisonment until they age out’ of criminal activity”. The ACLU emphasizes that “only 1 percent” of all serious crimes are committed by people over age 60.
Reasonable people may wonder: What threat is posed by a doddering old man like James Bernice Blailock, currently housed in the McCain Institute?
After recounting a long and complicated story involving drug-dealing, a 20-year sentence and police seizing $10,000 cash, his Seiko watches and personal possessions, the 65-year-old Blailock gets to the heart of his plight: How does he get out?
“How can I go about getting a clemency act, because, as you can see, I’m eat up with emphysema, I’m on three sprays a day, and a pill three times a day. That’s just for respiratory breathing. I’ve got a shoulder here that they’ve squirted cortisone in twice, which hasn’t helped — at times, I can’t even raise my left arm. I’m just all messed up.”
“Now, how do I go about getting some help on my sentence?” Experience and sentencing laws suggest very little can be done.
And what will become of the similarly ailing James Veach ?
Walks with a cane
Veach, 85, walks with a cane and appears hale, but the tall, white-haired senior is quite deaf, and a conversation requires many high-decibel exchanges (“How LONG . . . is your SEN-TENCE?” — “Eh?”) . Veach can still protest lucidly about the incident that led to his sentence on murder charges in 1996 . In a dispute over an 18-inch stretch of his land overlapped by a neighbor’s fence, he pulled out a shotgun and blasted his neighbor four times. The wounded man staggered back to his home, where he died. Veach retorted in court that the neighbor had attacked him with a hoe, and he “reacted in self-defence”. He will be in Hamilton A.& I. for a decade, entering the new millennium serving his murder conviction. He remains outwardly impassive over his fate, awaiting parole in 2006 when he will be … 94.
Victim-rights groups argue that the age of an attacked is irrelevant: if someone is guilty of assault or rape, they should do the time sentenced, even if that leads to old men being jailed in perpetuity. Protecting society from frail old men, however, may turn out like “destroying the village to save it”, if the prison population keeps surging upwards at great cost to the public sector.
At the Warkworth institution in Ontario, Canada, inmate Helmut Buxbaum, 60, proposes that the federal Young Offenders Act, which sets the ground rules for juvenile justice, be matched with an “older offenders act”. This would recognize the distinct physical and mental health needs of senior prisoners. It might, for example, reward prisoners’ good behavior with early transfer to ward-like, low-security prison hospitals where visits from family would be much less difficult and stressful. Or require community service for the right to return to civil society where they could “undemonize” themselves.
But the prospects for geriatric prisons and new possibilities of early parole for disabled convicts all fade into the horizon of speculation and wishful thinking for an aging old convict like Walker Smith. Still, he manages to express nothing but sunny sentiments.
A slim, fragile-looking 74-year-old with a sharply protruding lower lip, Smith was convicted on a murder charge in 1983 in Lee County, Ala. He had killed his mother in a rage by repeatedly stabbing her with a kitchen knife in a dispute over whether she would wash his laundry.
Smith was first sent to Alabama’s rough Kilby prison, before being transferred to Hamilton A.&I. “It’s the best place I’ve been in. There are maybe two, three guys who give you trouble, that’s all. ” Smith, who suffers recurrent health problems, praises the prison health facilities: “Since I slipped bad on the bathroom floor, I’ve never been in as good shape. But you get good attention here; it’s closed in and convenient.” As for his prospects, scarcely a wisp of despair clouds Smith horizons. “I’ve been before the (parole) board twice. They turned me down; said I was not ready. I go back in May.”
As he strikes a match to his lumpy, hand-rolled cigarette, Smith emphasizes his hopes. “I believe in the Ten Commandments, in Jesus Christ, in prayer,” he says, smiling. “All I can say is, thank God for bringing me this far.”
Before Smith can finish a drag on his cigarette, he is drowned out by the evening chapel meeting in the nearby canteen, where inmates suddenly raise their voices in a wobbly chorus of Amazing Grace.
Amazing grace? One senses that, after all the rough knocks he has taken, an aging prisoner like Walker Smith is about due for some.
