Dementia is a harrowing illness. Mix it with life in prison and you get a truly alarming situation.
Pam Belluck of The New York Times opened our eyes to the issue last week in a sobering piece about aging prisoners with serious memory problems, which are often unrecognized and undiagnosed.
Judith Graham (@judith_graham), AHCJ’s topic leader on aging, is writing blog posts, editing tip sheets and articles and gathering resources to help our members cover the many issues around our aging society.
If you have questions or suggestions for future resources on the topic, please send them to judith@healthjournalism.org.
It’s hard to say which is more attention-grabbing in Belluck’s riveting story: the greying prisoners with dementia who bang their heads against walls, urinate on floors, strike out in agitation, and shake with paranoia, or the convicted killers who tend to them after beating, stabbing or shooting relatives, friends or strangers.
Belluck sets the scene by discussing longer sentences that are causing more inmates to age in place behind bars. An estimated 125,000 prisoners are 55 and older, she notes, and these inmates are “more prone to dementia” because of violence, head injuries, substance abuse, limited education, depression, and others forms of poor health.
Overcrowded, under-staffed prisons are “desperately unprepared to handle” demented inmates, who typically need extra oversight, additional medical care, and often protection from other “predatory prisoners,” Belluck observes.
So, some facilities are enlisting younger inmates to help older inmates with memory problems. Belluck sets her story at the California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo, where the helpers, called Gold Coats, get $50 a month for their efforts.
There, she discovers details that make this story stand out:
“When a prisoner tried stealing a patient’s dessert, Mr. Montgomery, one of the Gold Coats, snarled, ‘You got to give him his cookie back.’
“‘Who are you, the PO-lice?’ the inmate barked. Mr. Montgomery retorted, ‘Yes, I’m the PO-lice!’”
There are unexpected benefits for some of the helpers, who do everything from filing older inmates’ fingernails to changing diapers. Shawn Henderson, a convicted double murderer, was finally paroled after serving as a Gold Coat, and claims he learned an important lesson from the work.
“Doing a job where ‘you get spit on, feces thrown on you, urine on you, you get cursed out’ helped teach him to cope outside prison, said Mr. Henderson, 46. ‘Now when I come into an encounter like that on the street, I can be a lot more compassionate.’”
But Belluck doesn’t pretend all is for the best. The world she describes is a tragic one, where even prisoners who appear helpful have horrific, violence-filled pasts.
There’s a sense of ghosts moving through this story: the deceased but still remembered victims of terrible crimes that sent men here, and shadows that move fleetingly through demented prisoners’ minds, evoking a time that once was but is no longer. Belluck writes:
“One 73-year-old inmate stands by a gate most mornings, waiting for his long-dead mother to pick him up. Sometimes he refuses to show, afraid of missing her.” Another prisoner, 71, pines for his wife, not realizing that his crime had been “murdering the woman he was tearful about,” according to a statement from a psychiatrist.
This story is well worth examining closely because of its unflinching approach, its depth of perspective, its unsentimental humanity, and its willingness to explore uncomfortable realities associated with aging under extremely difficult circumstances.
