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MUST READ: Does it make sense to imprison the elderly?
The Web site for the award-winning alternative weekly, the Philadelphia City Paper.
MUST READ: Does it make sense to imprison the elderly?
It's a good question, and one Jamelle Bouie explores admirably.
I understand the logic of incarcerating the elderly — a murder committed 40 years ago is still a murder — but it's hard to see the enterprise as anything other than absurd. Crime is a game for the young; the vast majority of crimes are committed by men in their late teens and 20s. Criminal behavior drops sharply drops after age 30 and enters a permanent tailspin after late middle age. According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report for 2009, fewer than 1 percent of all crimes are attributable to those 60 and older. Assuming you could weed out the most dangerous inmates from those who are basically harmless, it makes the most sense to just release prisoners once they reach 65; at that point, they are well past the peak years for criminal behavior. If that's too radical, you could mandate the possibility of parole for any inmate serving a life sentence, or one that would leave them imprisoned past the age of 60.
On the one hand, empirically, Bouie has an undeniably legit point — if the sole purpose of life incarceration is to protect society from violent offenders, rather than to punish misdeeds. All the same, in an era of prison overcrowding, might it make sense to release the elderly and infirm to free up resources and space to deal with younger, more violent people? It's a reasonable proposition. On the other hand, many of these elderly prisoners are behind bars for a good reason, and if we are to oppose capital punishment, which I do, on the grounds that, well, it is a backward, medieval, ineffective and expensive system of extracting justice — and that's ignoring the ever-present possibility that we'll kill innocents — society must have recourse to punish the worst among us, those who through their actions have given up the right to live freely among us.
Feel free to weigh in in the comments.
I don't know much about the statute of limitations, but I think it should never run out for serious felonies. Roman Polanski raped a girl many years ago and has been evading authorities ever since living outside the US...should we just give him a free pass? What about these old guys that were Nazis in WWII and committed grisly war crimes (though they are dying off)? Seems to me they should be locked up and/or executed whatever age they might be.
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