COLUMN ONE : Doing Time in a Jail for Old-Timers : ‘Old Man’s Dorm’ inmates enjoy camaraderie, bingo and free nursing care. Cost of their convalescent home behind bars raises concerns about the wave of elderly prisoners expected under ‘three strikes.’

Every time S. M. Cohen takes a pill, visits a doctor, has a blood test, receives a shot of insulin or undergoes surgery, Californians pay for it.

Cohen, 67, an inmate at the California Institution for Men, has cancer and diabetes and takes 11 pills a day. He has blood tests twice a month and sees three specialists. His medical bills are more than $125,000 a year. His recent heart bypass cost $76,000.

Cohen, who is doing nine years for grand theft, is housed in a unit inmates call “Old Man’s Dorm,” a cavernous hall filled with grizzled prisoners who mill about using canes, walkers, wheelchairs and crutches. The highlight of their week is the Wednesday night bingo game.

Soon the state’s population of geriatric prisoners will increase dramatically because of the new “three strikes” law, which is aimed at putting three-time felons behind bars for life. And there will be many more facilities such as Old Man’s Dorm--the only unit in the state designed for low-security, geriatric prisoners.

Californians will have to decide how long elderly offenders should be kept behind bars. This decision will highlight a philosophical divide between those who believe society’s need for justice is paramount, and others who argue that many elderly prisoners should be given early release because they no longer are dangerous and it is expensive to imprison them.

The predicted wave of elderly “lifers” will “create an economic disaster for the state,” said Dr. Armand Start, a national expert on prison medical care. Funding eventually will have to be siphoned off from other state programs such as education, he said.

California will not be able to build prisons fast enough to keep pace with the influx of elderly prisoners, said Start, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Medical School. Dangerous first-time offenders eventually will have to be paroled early, he said, to make room for older, less violent prisoners serving mandatory life terms.

Only about 2% of the state’s prisoners are over 55. And Old Man’s Dorm--officially known as Elm Hall--has long been viewed as a curiosity.

But now Elm Hall, which is essentially a convalescent hospital behind bars, offers a glimpse into the future of the state prison system. There are some younger, disabled inmates, but most of the 150 prisoners are elderly men with bifocals who never miss the weekly meetings of their senior citizens’ group.

There are no cellblocks because the prisoners need wheelchair and ambulance access. And despite chronic prison overcrowding, there are no bunk beds because most of the old-timers do not have the strength to climb to the top bed. Many are recovering from strokes, heart attacks or crippling bouts of arthritis.

Elm Hall is a large cinder-block dormitory with rows of cots and lockers. A nurse is on duty until 10 p.m., to make sure no one slips in the shower or cannot get out of bed. Dorm living is better than the hard time of a cellblock, but most prisoners share one great fear.

“Everyone is terrified of dying here,” said Cohen, who has a pencil-thin mustache and neatly trimmed gray hair. “That’s what bothers us the most. We’ve seen people die in here, and it’s the loneliest death in the world.”

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Elm Hall was designed in the early 1960s--with wheelchair ramps, bathtubs and a heating system--to house the state’s small population of elderly prisoners. At that time the old-timers mingled easily with the mainline population. But during the 1980s, when young gangbangers began pouring into the prison system, the clash of generations created friction.

Many old-timers say they have only contempt for the young prisoners. Old-timers call themselves convicts, and refer contemptuously to the young prisoners as inmates. The inmates, the old-timers complain, “don’t know how to do time.” They snitch on each other; they steal out of lockers; they cut in front of people in chow lines. One elderly prisoner said that if, in his day, you cut in front of someone in line you would get a shiv in the belly.

William Ross, 81, a bald, diminutive man with a faint resemblance to George Burns, is the dean of Old Man’s Dorm. Ross, who is serving a two-year sentence for check kiting, looks out of place amid the young, tattooed prisoners pumping up at the weight pile.

One night last month, Ross was walking from the canteen, after buying cream, coffee and sugar. Two young inmates ran up behind him and tried to rip off his bag of supplies. But a few elderly prisoners, who were tailing him, began shouting for a guard. Ross held tight to the bag and the thieves were scared off.

“We old-timers stick together,” said Ross, squinting through thick glasses. “When we head out to the yard we try to go in groups. If somebody has to go out alone, the others try to keep an eye out for him.”

Years ago, in the days when it was not so smoggy and they could see Mt. Baldy, prisoners founded the Mountain View Senior Citizens Group. Members still collect aluminum cans and sometimes sell candy and doughnuts to raise money.

If an old-timer is about to be released, but does not have enough money to get home or needs a new suit of clothes, group members will chip in with the cash. The family of one man who died in prison wanted to give him a proper burial, but they did not have the money. The group raised $1,000.

One Elm Hall inmate had such a long criminal history, officials say, he started out robbing stagecoaches. When he was released, he was 91 and still chain-smoking unfiltered Lucky Strikes.

Another renowned resident was Ronnie Fairbanks, whom officials listed as 90 when he last entered prison. But they could not be sure. Fairbanks had given authorities 21 birth dates since he was first arrested for larceny in 1928.

He also had used 88 aliases during his criminal career, which included more than 40 arrests. Fairbanks often boasted that he never committed a violent crime. He was last arrested for stealing a suitcase at Los Angeles International Airport and was released from Chino in 1988. He has not been back. Yet.

“He may have been 90, but he was in great shape,” said Diana Smith, program administrator for Elm Hall. “He jogged every day and kept himself in top physical condition. He was a very charming guy, very genteel, always polite.”

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Not every prisoner is eligible for Elm Hall, Smith said. When Charles Manson becomes a senior citizen, she said, he will not be welcome. Prison officials will not admit notorious criminals, child molesters or anyone with a violent history.

Building more facilities such as Elm Hall is not the best way to deal with aging inmates, many prison experts say. When criminals hit middle age they begin burning out, said Start, who heads the National Center for Correctional Health Care Studies. Criminals in their 40s and 50s--like the rest of the population--are affected by aging. They become less impetuous, less hostile, less prone to violent behavior, he said.

A federal Bureau of Justice Statistics report found age to be the single most reliable indicator in predicting recidivism. About 22% of prisoners ages 18 to 24 return to prison within a year of their release; for prisoners over 55 the rate is less than 2%.

The 20 new prisons that are planned in California will not keep pace with the deluge of new inmates generated by the “three strikes” law, said Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University. In other states with “three strikes” measures, Turley said, officials had to release violent first-time offenders early because of overcrowding. They needed to make room for the growing population of elderly prisoners with life sentences. Turley predicted that California prison administrators eventually will have to do the same.

In Texas, which has a “three strikes” measure and a number of other mandatory sentencing provisions, inmates last year served an average of only 11% of their sentences. (California inmates serve about 50% of their sentences.) The Texas law recently has been changed, requiring inmates to serve a higher proportion of their terms. But young violent offenders will still have to be paroled early to make room for older prisoners serving mandatory life sentences, Texas prison experts say.

“This system makes no sense,” said Turley, who heads a Washington project that evaluates the parole status of elderly prisoners. “We’ll be keeping in prison the inmates who are at a point in their life when they are least likely to commit another crime. And we’ll be releasing those young offenders who are most dangerous. This system works against everything we’ve learned about recidivism.”

Geriatric prisoners cost institutions about $60,000 a year--three times more than younger inmates, according to recent studies. On average, inmates over 55 suffer three chronic illnesses while incarcerated. Some do most of their time in prison infirmaries. Others run up huge bills at private hospitals because most prisons contract with outside facilities for major medical work.

But David Beatty, a spokesman for the National Victim Center, said victims’ rights advocates are more concerned with the “human cost” of releasing repeat offenders than “the financial cost” of keeping them in prison. Even if the odds are slim that a geriatric prisoner, if released, would commit another crime, Beatty said, “most victims aren’t willing to take that chance. They feel more comfortable with these kind of people locked up forever.”

No one in the Department of Corrections can predict how many elderly prisoners to expect in coming years. Prison officials say they have been preoccupied with other problems such as AIDS, tuberculosis and gangs. They plan to research the issue this year.

California’s “three strikes” measure calls for a minimum of 25 years to life for any felon who has committed two prior violent or serious felonies--crimes that range from murder to home burglary. In today’s political climate, 25 years to life often is the equivalent of life without possibility of parole, said Heather MacKay, a staff attorney for the Prison Law Office, a Bay Area prison reform group. The parole board, she said, “because of the prevailing political climate, often is reluctant to grant any paroles at all.”

While California gears up for a deluge of geriatric prisoners, many states are moving in the opposite direction. They are involved in “compassionate release” programs for elderly prisoners who do not appear to be a threat to society.

Law professor Turley heads the Project for Older Prisoners, which lobbies parole boards in dozens of states on the issue of early release for elderly prisoners. Of all the prisoners evaluated, the project has only recommended 10%--about 60--for early release. Not a single one the project has helped free has returned to prison, he said.

He founded the project five years ago when he represented Quenton Brown, a Louisiana man with an IQ of 51. Brown had robbed a bread store of $117 and a cherry pie. When police arrested him he was crouched beneath a house across the street, eating a piece of pie.

Turley heard about Brown’s case after he had served 18 years of a 30-year sentence. Brown, then 67, was suffering from emphysema and bleeding ulcers and was released after Turley argued his case before the parole board. It did not make sense to continue to incarcerate inmates like Brown, Turley argued, when young, violent prisoners were being released under a court order to ease the overcrowding in Louisiana prisons.

Working with law student volunteers, Turley evaluates the criminal histories of prisoners and rejects those who were convicted of sex crimes or violent offenses. Many elderly prisoners, he said, belong behind bars for the rest of their lives. But how much of a threat is an inmate who is recovering from a stroke, has only a few months to live and wants to spend his final days with his family?

About 40% of Medicare dollars are spent in the last two weeks of a patient’s life. Because some prisoners’ families have insurance, Turley said, it makes more sense to release some of them than to stick taxpayers with exorbitant medical bills.

An elderly prisoner who costs the state $60,000 a year could be housed in a private nursing home for much less. Yet California will be building 20 prisons, at a cost of about $100,000 per cell, to accommodate a new wave of prisoners, many of them senior citizens.

Turley said he does not recommend “wholesale release of older prisoners.” What he does advocate is legislation that will allow states, through special parole laws, to give consideration to low-risk, high-cost elderly inmates. But few California politicians are willing to support any measures calling for early release of prisoners--regardless of their age.

“Politicians are now running the prison systems by sound bite,” Turley said. “The truth of the matter is, by the time we interview inmates who are in their 60s, 70s and 80s, most of them are statistically less dangerous than the law students I drive to the prison with.”