Prisons Are Bracing for More Elderly Inmates : Crime: People 65 and older have accounted for 0.8% of serious crimes over the last decade, the FBI says.

We’re a nation that minds our elders--when we’re not prosecuting or incarcerating them.

Recent times have offered several reminders that advanced age confers no immunity to the temptation of crime or the sting of punishment:

* Former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford, 85, Washington “wise man,” was indicted in the BCCI scandal.

* Another former defense secretary, Caspar W. Weinberger, 75, is preparing for trial on charges he lied about the Iran-Contra affair.

* Hotel queen Leona Helmsley, 72, was briefly excused from her four-year prison sentence for tax evasion to be at the bedside of her husband and former co-defendant, 83-year-old Harry Helmsley.

* Mafia boss Anthony (Fat Tony) Salerno, who until 1985 had never served more than six months in jail, died in prison at age 80, having spent the last seven of his golden years behind bars.

People 65 and older have accounted for 0.8% of serious crimes over the last decade, according to the FBI. But that percentage is expected to rise as the general population ages.

“If the criminal justice system has one absolute certainty, it’s that it’ll be dealing with more older people,” said Robert Langworthy, a University of Cincinnati professor.

The advent of mandatory sentences for many federal crimes allows judges less leeway to cut a break for oldsters or anyone else. Accordingly, “we’ll have a dramatic increase in the number of older inmates,” said Matthew Bronick, a health services specialist at the Bureau of Prisons.

These elderly defendants typically evoke a mixture of sympathy and contempt.

Clifford, columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote recently, “was in on the old man’s charge of failing to resist one last big shot.” But when Clifford rose in court to proclaim his innocence, he leaned on his two lawyers. Even the district attorney sounded a little ambivalent.

“I certainly don’t get pleasure out of indicting an 85-year-old,” explained Robert Morgenthau. But, he asked, “How do you justify prosecuting the nickel-bag 19-year-old (drug dealer) without looking at who’s making and taking and processing that money?”

Morgenthau is 73 and Lawrence E. Walsh, who will prosecute Weinberger, is 80, suggesting that the pursuit of elderly offenders is not the product of intergenerational antagonisms.

Nor is it a purely American affair. Erich Honecker, 79, the East German leader who built the Berlin Wall, has finally returned home to face trial for manslaughter in the deaths of 49 people killed trying to escape East Berlin over three decades.

And it is not restricted to the white-collared. Salerno, who was boss of New York’s Genovese crime family, was put away at 73 and spent his last three years in a prison hospital in Springfield, Mo. He suffered from diabetes, possible prostate cancer and the effects of several strokes.

Mob bosses, in fact, form a distinct subset of the elderly delinquent.

Carlos Marcello of New Orleans entered prison at 73 to serve 6 1/2 years for bribery. Joseph Bonanno, founder of the New York crime family that bears his name, went to prison for the first time in 1985 at age 80 and served 13 months, many of them in the prison hospital.

To prepare for the graying of its population, the prisons bureau--which has seen the number of prisoners over 50 grow from 4,100 to 6,500 over the last five years--is developing new education and recreation programs. And it has converted a hospital in Carville, La., into its first long-term care center.

Langworthy wondered if a system designed to handle young men can accommodate their elders, or if there will be separate institutions for the elderly, just as there are for women and juveniles.

“When you have someone who can’t feed himself,” he asked, “do you make him shuffle into the prison dining room?”