The following opinion piece, “Releasing Elderly Inmates from Women’s Prisons is Smart State Policy,” is written by Jane Dorotik and appears in the Sacramento Bee. This opinion follows the release of “No Time to Wait,” a collaborative report between the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP) and the Policy Advocacy Clinic (PAC) at the University of California, Berkeley. This vitally important work details that incarcerating elders in California women’s prisons is unjustified, costly, and inhumane. Releasing elders from its women’s prisons will help California address the crisis of its rapidly aging prison population.
Excerpts from the opinion piece appear below.
California has created tools for prison release — including the elderly parole program in 2014. So why are so many elders still locked up in women’s prisons?
I spent 20 years of my older age incarcerated in prison. I’m now 79 years old, and spend the majority of my time advocating for the women I left behind: a woman with dementia who can’t find her way back to her room; a woman who struggles to balance her oxygen tank on her walker to execute her mandated job assignment; and a 94-year old who is forced to attend school, working toward a high school diploma she will never use.
We all have a stake in addressing the persistent problem of elder abuse behind bars. “No Time to Wait” is a new report co-authored by the California Coalition for Women Prisoners and the UC Berkeley School of Law Policy Advocacy Clinic, documenting how California’s practice of incarcerating elders in its women’s prisons is unjustified, inhumane and costly.
Data from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation shows that re-arrest and re-conviction rates decline with age and are generally even lower for women. Fewer than 5% of people aged 60 and older go back to prison within three years of release. Yet approximately 740 people aged 50 and older remain incarcerated in California’s women’s prisons — costing them their health and safety and costing taxpayers millions.
Californians pay close to $128,000 a year to incarcerate a younger person, and two to three times that amount for elderly individuals. People incarcerated in women’s prisons are more likely to enter prison with pre-existing health conditions, and incarceration dramatically accelerates aging.
California’s prison system has a long, consistent track record of inadequate, neglectful, abusive medical care: In a recent survey of elder women incarcerated in California, 88% reported experiencing medical abuse or neglect. Instead of attempting to prop up a failing health care system, releasing elders would free up millions of dollars of funding for desperately needed social services.
Prisons should not serve as memory care or assisted living facilities. The California legislature created a specific pathway for elder release and amended the program to increase eligibility twice in the last decade. The state’s decisionmakers clearly understand that the problem of elder incarceration needs to be solved, but the Board of Parole Hearings is not effectively using the tools at their disposal.
Incarcerating people who have aged out of crime is morally and fiscally irresponsible.
You can read the full opinion piece,”Releasing Elderly Inmates from Women’s Prisons is Smart State Policy,” on the Sacramento Bee website.
Jane Dorotik is an advocate with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners. After serving 20 years in prison, Dorotik was exonerated in 2022 after a wrongful conviction in the February 2020 death of her husband, Bob Dorotik.
