Gray Wing

Prisons were built for the young. Now they are filling with the old. The Gray Wing: How Aging Nations Are Turning Their Prisons into Nursing Homes follows one of the quietest and most expensive shifts in modern criminal justice, as people sentenced decades ago grow frail, forgetful and sick behind bars. The book opens with a prison full on the day it opened and works through the numbers that explain how the population got so old: the long sentences, the sentence enhancements, the changes in the law that kept people inside past the point of any public safety reason. It then goes inside the cells and wards, from the top bunk that an elderly man can no longer climb to the gold coats worn by inmate aides who do the work of nurses and orderlies. It looks at what happens when a person is punished for forgetting, what the courts mean by deliberate indifference, and what it costs to care for an eighty-year-old in a system built for twenty-two-year-olds. You will meet the families waiting for a parole hearing, the requests for compassionate release that get denied as moot, and the people who simply have nowhere to go when the gate finally opens. The later chapters ask the hard policy questions: what a decent three meals and a doctor would look like, whether a sentence of ninety years is still a sentence, and what choices lawmakers face. The Gray Wing is a clear, fair and deeply reported look at aging, health care and punishment, for readers of criminal justice, public policy and elder care.