A Jail Break For Geriatrics

FEDERAL AND STATE GOVERNMENTS CAN SIGNIFICANTLY reduce spending in a field of soaring costs, while radically reducing their rates of recidivism among criminals released from prison. All they need to do is put hundreds, perhaps thousands, of convicts where they belong, which is--really--back in society. This idea will probably be a hard sell to a crime-conscious public in a conservative era. But consider Quenton Brown, whose case gave rise to POPS (the Project for Older Prisoners). And consider the case of Noah Wade, who also illustrates the point of POPS.

In June 1973 Brown, then 50, with an IQ of 51, stole $117 and a 15-cent cherry pie from a Morgan City, La., store. He crossed the street, crawled under a house, ate the pie and docilely surrendered himself and his .38 pistol, which may not have been in working order, to police when they arrived. He was sentenced to 30 years without parole.

Seventeen years into that sentence, at age 67, he came to the attention of a young Tulane law professor, Jonathan Turley, who was struck by the anomaly of the graying prison population-- aging men becoming more and more expensive to warehouse as they become less and less dangerous. By the time he had won a parole for Brown, Turley and more than 200 Tulane law students had become founders of POPS, an organization devoted to culling low-risk geriatrics from overcrowded prisons.

In 1944, Noah Wade, then probably 19, had consensual sex with a 15-year-old. Virginia charged him with statutory rape. Wade says the girl's father said Wade must marry her. Wade says he was already married to a 14-year-old. Sentenced to seven years, he got into a fight with an inmate. Both men wielded prison-made shanks, both were stabbed. The other man died. Wade was sentenced to life. In 1992, shortly before Virginia's prison system became so crowded that the state started paying other states to incarcerate some of its convicts, POPS got Wade paroled to a Richmond nursing home.

It costs about $20,000 a year to imprison a young, healthy, dangerous man. Because of the normal medical costs associated with aging, and the unhealthy nature of prison life, it costs two to three times that, and sometimes more, to imprison someone 55 or older. (Because they usually have led hard lives before prison, and because of the chronic stress, idleness and the rest of prison life, 55-year-old prisoners often are, physiologically, akin to people seven or eight years older than that.) Men 55 and older comprise one of the fastest-growing cohorts in the prison population. And because of society's turn toward long sentences and away from parole, by the end of this decade there may be 90,000 prisoners over the age of 50.

Which is not to say that there should be wholesale de-institutionalization of the elderly. Organizations advocating victims' rights insist, reasonably, that retribution should not be lightly abandoned for budgetary reasons. They denounce the notion of ""senior-citizen discounts'' for criminals. However, their sensible philosophy encounters a stubborn fact: no matter how fast billions are poured into increasing the supply of cells, the supply of truly dangerous convicts increases faster. This is partly because, Turley says, sheriffs read newspapers: ""They know when a new prison is coming on line and they start to execute warrants. And in state after state, we see a self-adjusting market.'' And, inevitably, courts get involved.