Reading and All That Jazz 5th Edition by Rita McCarthy ,Peter Mather

Exercise 6

Growing Old Behind Gray Walls
John Saxon expects to die in prison. For the better part of the 1990s, the 56-year-old paraplegic has been serving a 15- to 30-year sentence for killing a person and wounding two others. He is confined to a hospital bed and can't feed himself or go to the bathroom alone. He is one of the nearly 40,000 prisoners aged 55 or older in state and federal prisons in this country. Elderly prisoners like John are a significant financial burden. Their medical expenses are estimated to be two to three times greater than those for younger prisoners. Inmates are not eligible for Medicaid or Medicare, and federal judges have ruled that failure to provide adequate care is a violation of the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Because of these regulations, prison systems end up footing the entire bill for treatments of cancer, heart disease, prostate problems, strokes, Alzheimer's and emphysema. Estimates are that within the next few years there could be 125,000 geriatric prisoners. Today medical expenses are the fastest growing items in prison budgets, and expenditures on prisons are the fastest growing items in state budgets. In the near future, the cost to states may well become too much to bear.
( Criminal Justice , fourth edition, by Freda Adler, New York, McGraw-Hill, 2006, pp. 370-371)
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