This year, North Country Public Radio (NY) has been looking in-depth at the growth of the prison industry here in our region, across New York and around the country.
Over the last four decades, we’ve seen the number of men and women behind bars soar–many serving long mandatory sentences for low-level crimes.
And one side-effect of those tough-on-crime policies today is that the number of elderly inmates is surging–growing by almost eighty percent from 2000 through 2009. Prison officials across the US are struggling to sort out what that means, how we think about and care for inmates who grow old and die in our prisons.
In part one of our investigative report, Natasha Haverty found that despite recent reforms to the system, many terminally ill inmates are forced to remain behind bars even when they no longer appear to be a threat to society. Even some prison officials think the process for allowing inmates to die at home needs fixing.