'Huge problems' for seniors in state's prisons

Megan Edge is ACLU Prison Project Director. Earlier in her career she worked at the Alaska Dept. of Corrections. This is part of a longer interview with Edge conducted by Lawrence D. Weiss.

What are some of the key issues regarding seniors in the Alaska prison system?

There's more than 400 people over the age of 60 that are incarcerated in our jails and prisons on any given day. They are one of the most vulnerable prison populations and also one of the most expensive populations. It is a growing demographic. Our prisoners are aging rapidly.

This is a huge, huge problem within our prison system. Quite honestly, our prisons are not built to be hospitals. They're not built to be senior centers, they're not built to really be therapeutic or a humane space for anybody, but especially seniors, and the result of that is really devastating.

We do have systems that we could be releasing people, but we're not really using them. We have medical parole, we have geriatric parole, but very few people apply for them, and the people who do apply for them are not granted. In one case a couple years ago, they finally did grant somebody medical parole, but they wouldn't let him get out for I think it was close to seven months, and he actually died before he was able to get out.

So it's quite devastating. One thing that I think is really important to understand about this population of people is most people do not start committing crimes when they're 60 years old. They've been serving decades in incarceration. There should be opportunities to review their sentence because the treatment that they get while they're incarcerated is quite appalling.

Our prisons are not built to support people that have a lot of the complicated health issues that seniors tend to develop. There's no place for people with Alzheimer's and dementia to be safe without going to solitary confinement. I knew one man who was in solitary confinement with dementia for months and months and months before he finally was released. That time in solitary confinement was extremely detrimental to his health and caused him to deteriorate faster, we believe, than he would have had he not been in solitary confinement.

And it's the same with other medical issues. While they have been incarcerated they have not received any preventative care. They're not doing regular cancer screenings, regular medical checkups. They're really not doing that. You have to navigate a very bureaucratic, complicated process to even ask to seek medical treatment, and it takes months.

The Dept. of Corrections does not often follow their own policies and procedures on those issues, but because there's no preventative care, by the time somebody reaches 60 years old they often have a myriad of medical issues that could have been prevented had they been able to access medical care before 60. And when they get to that point, they've escalated far enough where Dept. of Corrections then has to address it. But at that point for many people it's too late. It's a matter of trying to keep them comfortable-like whatever that means in a carceral setting.

I don't understand what the resistance is to using these provisions to release seniors from prison, particularly if it would save the state money.

I completely agree. We are involved in an effort right now to reform the parole board to make it a more meaningful opportunity for people to go home. The parole board should not have sentencing authority but they do, and so it's a really common reason that people are getting denied discretionary parole. It doesn't matter how well you did in prison, how good your disciplinary record looked, it doesn't matter what your reentry plan looks like. [The Board argues that] there's no way to bring someone back to life. There's no way to undo a harm that you committed when you were 20 years old, and so it's sort of this impossible measure for this population of people.

I truly don't understand the resistance of doing this because it costs a lot of money. End of life care costs a ridiculous amount of money. If you could reduce the older population, the state would no longer have to carry that burden. Some of the time when people can't get out, it's really wild to see because this person is in a wheelchair. He is blind. He has a son that's willing to care for him during the last years of his life. What is he going to do in our community that's going to create harm?

I'm assuming we can anticipate that the over-60 demographic will grow in the future.

Yeah, it has been on an upward trajectory for the last few years. They went in at 16 and 17 years old, and they went into the system during the war on drugs and the super-predator [a now-debunked theory about violent youth] era going in the 80s and 90s. The whiplash from that super predator era is very clear. In our prison system we have groups of seniors that grew up in the system, and unless things change, that will likely also be their coffin.

Note: For more information see: https://www.acluak.org/en/our-work/aclu-alaska-prison-project. This interview was conducted Dec. 5, 2024. It has been edited for length and clarity.