By The Justice Policy Institute

This paper reveals how nearly 50 years of punitive sentencing have created a crisis inside U.S. prisons, with elders serving decades-long sentences, being left sick, vulnerable, and detained, but unlikely to reoffend

According to the National Commission on Correctional Health Care, by 2030, one-third of all incarcerated people in the U.S. will be over the age of 50.

Behind bars, these older individuals face increasing health problems – dementia, heart disease, diabetes, and mobility issues – exacerbated by conditions of confinement. The result? A growing humanitarian and financial crisis.

Older people cost at least twice as much to incarcerate as younger people, yet pose little risk to public safety. Fewer than 2% of people aged 55 and over who are incarcerated for a violent offense return to prison for a new crime.

Sentenced to Grow Old examines data from Iowa, Texas, and Illinois to:

Diagnose the causes of the aging prison population

Reveal the financial and human cost of extreme sentences

Point to proven solutions: parole reform, compassionate release, and second look laws

The proven solutions are more than just policy tools; they are pathways to dignity, care, and a smarter justice system. By addressing aging in prison, states can alleviate their financial obligations, provide better healthcare for their citizens, and maintain public safety.

Washington, DC: Justice Policy Institute 2025. 30p.

By Edward E. Rhine, Kelly Lyn Mitchell, and Kevin R. Reitz

Paroling authorities play an important, if often unrecognized role, in American prison policies. Discretionary parole processes decide the actual release dates for most individuals subject to confinement in 34 states. Additional leverage over time served is exercised through parole boards’ revocation and re-release authority. The degree of discretion these back-end officials exert over the dosage of incarceration is vast, sometimes more than that held by sentencing courts.

Any comprehensive program to change American prison policy must focus to a significant degree on prison-release discretion, where it exists, and its relationship to time served. During the buildup to mass incarceration, many parole boards became increasingly reluctant to grant release to eligible prisoners. Today, if it were possible to reverse this upward driver of prison populations, parole boards could be important contributors to a new evidence-based status quo of lower prison rates in many states. Reasonable objectives of reform include policy-driven increases in the likelihood of parole release, and more rational decision making overall about time served.

This report describes twelve “levers of change,” each associated with potential reforms in the realm of discretionary parole release. The reforms are called “change levers” because, once a lever is pulled, it is designed to impact prison populations by altering parole grant rates and durations of time served. The report identifies 12 areas of innovation that, to some degree, have already been tried by a number of states. In most cases, from a distance, it is impossible to evaluate the quality of each state’s implementation of one or more change levers, or the results that have been achieved. But the fact that states have begun to experiment in specific areas shows that there is an appetite for reform. In addition, actual experimentation indicates that some of the groundwork has been laid for evaluation, improvement, and dissemination of promising ideas to many additional states.

Some levers have become embedded in the decision protocols of parole boards over the past 20 years and more, while others have emerged only recently. One of the goals of this report is to demonstrate how combining the levers is key to reform. This report maps the terrain of the 12 identified change levers, to the degree permitted by available information. The map shows a huge amount of state-by-state variation, even without hands-on study of each system. The report further classifies individual levers based on the number of jurisdictions in which they have been identified, and their potential impact on states’ prison populations.

St. Paul, MN: Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice, 2022. 36p.