Special Prison Facility Helps Aging Convicts Ease Back Into Mainstream

They’re called the “easy keepers” in Washington’s prison system--men and women who go largely unnoticed because they’re old or disabled.

But these inmates are among the most costly, often taking up expensive hospital or infirmary space at big correctional facilities.

Looking for a way to both serve the needs of elderly and disabled prisoners and save money on bed space, the state Department of Corrections opened the Ahtanum View Assisted Living Facility in 1997.

“It’s a unique correctional environment,” says Supt. Joop DeJonge.

The minimum-security setting can house just 120 inmates, so the corrections staff has been able to tailor programs to the needs of the inmates, some of whom have lost the ability to do such basic tasks as balance a checkbook.

“We have expectations,” DeJonge says. “These guys in wheelchairs can do just as much as you and I.”

At 53, Rosemary “Rosie” Perez is considered elderly in prison parlance. She’s serving nearly two years on a drug conviction out of King County and has been at Ahtanum View since the fall.

Perez likes the safer, more relaxed, atmosphere here, where two dogs and two cats wander around, houseplants decorate tabletops, and corrections officers wear street clothes.

“It’s not like being incarcerated, other than not being able to go home at night,” Perez says.

The assisted living center, next to a 60-bed work release facility, is housed in the old Yakima County tuberculosis sanitarium. Before remodeling the building, the Department of Corrections had used it for storage.

Today, the coed Ahtanum View is a tidy, rather sterile, place, more like a military barracks or hospital ward than a prison. It costs nearly $50 a day to keep an inmate at Ahtanum View, about half the cost of an infirmary, DeJonge said.

The facility has two sets of elderly, DeJonge says: those who have grown old in prison and those who were locked up later in life, often male sex offenders.

“Age is not a deterrent to crime,” DeJonge says.

The graying of the prison population has the attention of corrections systems nationwide, and it’s just getting started, says Robert Sigler, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Alabama who has studied the issue of aging inmates.

Many prisons are dealing with older inmates who have spent decades locked up for violent crimes--people who stay in prison because parole boards and the public don’t want them released.

A man who kills three people with an ax at 20 and who, at 65, can’t even lift an ax still presents a huge public relations problem, Sigler says.

“Right now, it’s very severe offenders who have aged out in prison,” he says.

“The problem’s going to get worse,” he said, noting that life-without-parole legislation--including Washington’s three-strikes law--puts “some relatively mild offenders in prison for the rest of their lives.”

About 800 of Washington’s 12,000 inmates are over 50, which is defined as elderly.

“People age fairly quickly in an institutional setting,” DeJonge says.

Ahtanum View has inmates ranging from 19 to 86--eight women and 96 men. All of them are scheduled for release within four years.

That’s why DeJonge and his staff focus on self-reliance, trying to prepare the inmates for life on the outside. An old ex-convict or one with a disability faces a hard road.

The staff here routinely works with social service agencies to meet the needs of struggling inmates, and individuals with special needs must be placed properly, says Melissa Andrewjeski, correctional program manager.

“It’s been difficult to get them released,” she says. “Usually they can’t get out until we find a decent place.”

While here, inmates are expected to make a genuine contribution, whether it’s by watering plants, assembling bikes for a local cycle shop or dust-mopping floors.

They are paid a small amount for their work, about 25 cents an hour. They make restitution for their crimes.

Staff members teach conflict-resolution, how to manage money and ways to deal with medical needs in the real world.

It’s a far cry from the more conventional release approach of “giving them $40 and saying, ‘We hope you make it,’ ” DeJonge says. “We’re actually getting them working.”

But it’s still too early to say if the programs are making a difference on recidivism, he says.

Sid Smith, 59, has been in prison for three years and is looking forward to getting out of Ahtanum View in 15 months.

A convicted child molester with a merry face and a Santa Claus beard, he plans to return home to Indiana, where he wants to open a leather shop and buy, sell and trade horses.

The public often thinks of elderly inmates as harmless, but that’s not always the case, DeJonge says--especially with sex offenders.

He recalls a case early in his career involving a child molester on probation in western Washington. The 82-year-old man’s family took away his prosthetic legs to keep him out of trouble, but he still managed to drag himself from his wheelchair and crawl to an elementary school a few blocks away.

Police picked him up again before any harm was done.

Sex offenders don’t stay locked up all their lives, DeJonge says.

“Ninety to 95% are sooner or later going to get out.”