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Originally Posted by highthief
The odds of most male killers killing again in their 60s or 70s is pretty tiny also, statistically - don't see anyone making petitions saying let all the seniors out of jail.
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I don't know of any petitions but there are many agencies out there looking for a way to reduce the aging inmate population. I know there is a DOJ report out there somewhere but can't find a link. Bottom line is keeping elderly inmates in prison is down right costly. I did find this on Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisons...d_States#Aging
The percentage of prisoners in federal and state prisons 55 and older increased by 33% from 2000 to 2005 while the prison population grew by only 8%. The Southern Legislative Conference found that in 16 southern states the elderly prisoner population increased on average by 145% between 1997 and 2007. The growth in the elderly population brought along higher health care costs, most notably seen in the 10% average increase in state prison budgets from 2005 to 2006. The SLC expects the percentage of elderly prisoners relative to the overall prison population to continue to rise. Ronald Aday, a professor of aging studies at Middle Tennessee State University and author of Aging Prisoners: Crisis in American Corrections, concurs. One out of six prisoners in California is serving a life sentence. Aday predicts that by 2020 16% percent of those serving life sentences will be elderly.
Under U.S. law convicted felons lose their eligibility to apply for Medicare and Medicaid. Housing one prisoner costs a state between $18,000 and $31,000 annually, $33 per day for the average prisoner and $100 per day for an elderly prisoner. Most DOCs report spending more than 10 percent of the annual budget on elderly care. State governments pay all of their inmates' housing costs which significantly increase as prisoners age
The aging prison population is a huge burden on correctional depts. They would like nothing more then to release as many of these folks as possible. I'd like to hope they'd only release those they sincerely thought were no longer a threat. But then I'd also like to think beer makes me better looking and funnier. Bottom line is these compassion releases are largely driven by dollars and not sense.