Montgomery Advertiser
Editorial
November 21, 2005
 

It's hard to argue against the early parole of prison inmates who are so old or enfeebled as to pose no threat to society, but no one should imagine that this will have any appreciable impact on Alabama's chronic prison overcrowding problems. There just aren't very many of these inmates.

In fact, the age statistics in the Alabama Department of Corrections offer an insight that should not be ignored.

Earlier this year, the Legislature considered, but did not pass, a bill establishing a system for so-called geriatric paroles. The Board of Pardons and Paroles then took administrative steps to accomplish essentially the same thing.

It hasn't produced many paroles, however. A survey by the Mobile Register found that only one such inmate had been paroled in the first two months of hearings. Only 12 of these cases have been heard by the board. Two more are scheduled for this month.

Although it certainly makes sense to give serious consideration of parole to aged and infirm inmates, Alabama doesn't have enough of them for such a program to make a perceptible dent in the prison population, which stood at 23,867 at the end of September, according to Department of Corrections figures.

DOC has just 709 inmates who are more than 60 years old -- less than 3 percent of the total prison population. Paroling from this relative handful the handful who are so old and/or sick that they no longer are deemed dangerous has no real impact on the overcrowding problem.

There should be some financial impact in the form of reduced health care costs. DOC spokesman Brian Corbett told the Register that the average per-inmate health care cost is $2,693 per year. He had no figures for the over-60 inmates, but noted that "Common sense would tell you that these inmates would be costlier to incarcerate."

But even that is a minor consideration in the context of the overall budget, and no consideration at all in the department's persistent overcrowding problems.

The real insight to be taken from the numbers may lie in a different view of them, in the harsh reality that more than 97 percent of inmates are under 60 and almost 90 percent are under 50. That has a lot of implications, none of them good.

The high number of younger inmates, most of whom will eventually be released, raises serious concerns about their remaining years. How well equipped will they be to function again in law-abiding society? What are their prospects for employment and self-sufficiency? Is incarceration the best option, particularly for drug possession or other nonviolent offenses?

These issues matter far more than those surrounding geriatric paroles.

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