According to a report released in January by Human Rights Watch “Old Behind Bars: The Aging Prison Population in the United States” the number of older inmates in prison in the United States is at an all-time high.
The report found that the number of state and federal prisoners age 55 or older nearly quadrupled, increasing by 282 percent between 1995 and 2010. The number of prisoners age 65 and over increased by 63 percent between 2007 and 2010, while the overall prison population grew by only 0.7 percent.
