The Memory Disorder Unit in Massachusetts is “the federal prison system’s first purpose-built facility for incarcerated people with dementia.” Katie Engelhart in the NY Times:
There is a prisoner who thinks he is a warden. “I’m the boss. I’m going to fire you,” Victor Orena, who is 89, will tell the prison staff.
On some days, Mr. Orena is studiously aloof — as if he is simply too busy or important to deal with anybody else. On other days, he orders everyone around in an overwrought mafioso tone: a version of the voice that, perhaps, he used when he was a working New York City mob boss decades ago, browbeating members of his notorious crime family. This makes the real prison warden laugh.
On a recent morning, Mr. Orena sat in his wheelchair beside a man with bloodshot eyes. I asked them if they knew where they were.
“This is a prison,” Mr. Orena said, brightly.
“Why are you here?” I asked.
“I don’t remember,” he frowned. “I don’t know.” . . .
Down the hall from where Mr. Orena was sitting — past the activity room with the fish tank, where a cluster of men were watching “King Kong” on TV — there is a cell belonging to another man who wakes every day to discover anew that he is in prison. Some mornings, the man packs up his belongings and waits at the door. He explains that his mother is coming to get him.
“She sure is,” a staff member might say, before slowly leading him back to his cell.
Because of the long sentences we hand out to violent criminals, America now has thousands of very old men in prison, only a few of them in facilities that provide them any special care or treatment. Every time I read about this I get a feeling of the surreal; surely the long-term imprisonment of doddering old men in diapers is one of the weirder things going on in American today. Obviously these men can't just be released but I wonder how much more it costs to keep them in prison than in some other kind of facility.
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Sadly, this is a problem that stretches back a very long time in this country.
While it is, of course, a fictional portrayal, I can't help but recall the character of Brooks Hatlen in The Shawshank Redemption.
Brooks was a man who went into prison for murder in 1905 at the age of 23, and came out on good behavior in 1955 at the age of 73; a man who had only seen an automobile a single time in his life before incarceration, and who exited the penal system to a world utterly transformed by American Car Culture; a man who couldn't work, couldn't make a decent living, couldn't make friends, and couldn't make sense of the world he was thrown into; a man for whom prison had become home, and then when he was no longer deemed "a danger to society", that home was taken from him and he was left to fend for himself.
~~~
"The man's been in here fifty years, Haywood. Fifty years! This is all he knows! In here, he's an important man. He's an educated man. Outside, he's nothin'. Just a used up con, with arthritis in both hands. Probably couldn't get a library card if he tried.
...
I'm telling you, these walls are funny. First you hate 'em. Then you get used to 'em. Enough time passes... you get so you depend on them.
...
They send you here for life? That's exactly what they take. The part that counts, anyway."
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