The American prison population has gotten progressively older—and that’s potentially a big problem for taxpayers.
It generally costs $20,000-$30,000 a year to incarcerate someone, but just one prisoner over the age of 50 can cost up to three times more than the average prisoner. And in 2013, 270,000 out of 1.5 million prisoners were 50 and older, the Wall Street Journal reports.
That’s a much higher percentage than a decade ago. Between 1991 and 2011, the number of inmates over the age 44 grew 8 percent every year, and the proportion of prisoners 54 and up almost tripled.
The Journal’s report focuses on parsing the reasons behind this rapidly aging population. Most tend to chalk it up to strict sentencing laws: by slapping prisoners with lengthy mandatory minimum sentences, the justice system has found itself with more elderly inmates than ever.
But according to several new pieces of research, that’s not the whole story. It’s not just that prisoners are growing old in jail—an increasing number of middle-aged people are being convicted. “People are getting arrested and sentenced to prison at a higher rate in their 30s, 40s and 50s than they used to,” said Shawn Bushway, a public policy professor at the University at Albany.
Bushway credits pervasive drug use among this demographic, as well as dismal recidivism rates. Some of these older inmates have been to prison multiple times before. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2014 report, a third of state prisoners set free in 2005 were back behind bars within three years of their release.
As for harsh sentencing, some researchers concluded that it had “virtually no impact” on the population’s age, while another said it had “some effect,” and that “it would be misleading to downplay that too much.”
“You need to change the behavior of the district attorneys,” said John Pfaff, a Fordham University School of Law professor.
The report also suggests that an overall aging society may have something to do with the phenomenon.
