Another change involved new laws that borrowed a term from baseball: "three strikes and you're out." The federal government along with California and other states passed laws requiring, in some cases, a life sentence for a third offense.
FAITH LAPIDUS: John Paitakes served as a parole board member. He helped decide whether prisoners should be released early. Today Mr. Paitakes is a criminal justice professor at Seton Hall University in New Jersey. He says prison populations grew over the last generation especially because of drug laws.
JOHN PAITAKES: "In the seventies there were a lot of mandatory drug laws -- if you possess drugs within a certain feet of a school, a certain amount, if you sold to juveniles. They put some very lengthy sentences on drug distributers and drug users. So that tended to fill up a lot of the prisons over the years."
Guards patrol a cellblock at the Cummins Unit of the Arkansas Department of Correction in 2009
As of January of this year, just over eight percent of all federal prisoners were at least fifty-six years old. The Bureau of Prisons says it was responsible for eight thousand men and women between the ages of fifty-six and sixty. There were almost five thousand prisoners age sixty-one to sixty-five. And there were more than three thousand prisoners age sixty-six and older.
Other reports show that in two thousand nine, thirteen percent of all people in state prisons were over the age of fifty.
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2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25