Graying of The
Mass Incarceration
Prisons, ill-suited for providing health care, are facing an explosion of elderly inmates. BY VICTORIA LAW
MARY FISH turned sixty-eight in September. She did not celebrate with her sons or grandchildren. No one sang her happy birthday; nobody baked her a cake. Instead, she spent that day as she has her previous seventeen birthdays—behind bars. In 2002, Fish received two prison sentences totaling forty-eight years for assault and burglary. After entering prison, she stopped using drugs and alcohol. She’s participated in self-help groups, including Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, and various prison programs. At age fifty-three, Fish began working in the prison’s laundry room for $11 a month. For twelve hours a day, she pushed carts crammed with clothes and sheets, loading them in and out of the institutional washing machines and dryers. “I now have two herniated discs in my back,” she tells me in a letter from prison. She also enrolled in college courses, earning two associates degrees, which helped her shave some time off her sentence for good behavior. 18 | DECEMBER 2020 / JANUARY 2021
Victoria Law is a freelance journalist covering issues of incarceration and co-author of Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms.
Fish, who is serving her sentence at the Mabel Bassett Correctional Center, Oklahoma’s largest women’s prison, says she has eight years of prison left to go. She’s worried about catching COVID-19. Besides her back problems, she has high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes. Still, Fish considers herself lucky compared to other women aging around her. She does not have a terminal illness or a degenerative disease. She does not need a cane, walker, or wheelchair. But she knows her time is running out. “I sure don’t want to die in prison,” Fish wrote me. It’s one of her biggest fears. In 2018, the U.S. Department of Justice reported that nearly 21 percent of the nation’s prison population, or almost 300,000 people, were fifty or older. Outside prison, fifty is no longer considered elderly. But incarceration, with years of bad food, little opportunity to exercise, and inadequate medical care, accelerates the physiological aging process and often shortens life expectancy. Between 1995 and 2010, the number of prisoners aged fifty-five or older nearly quadrupled while the
