The two men went from youngsters to elders at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.
Both are New Orleans natives who spent more than half their lives in Angola before their release. Larry Price, 73, grew up Uptown in the 17th Ward. His friend Wee, 72, who didn’t want his full name used because he is on parole, was raised in the Desire public housing development in the 9th Ward.
Price was released first, in 2014. Within the next few years, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and underwent 29 rounds of radiation and two surgeries.
Wee got home four years later, In 2018, when he was released on parole. But after seeing a doctor for a checkup, he received a long list of diagnoses, including Hepatitis C, prostate cancer, glaucoma and cataracts.
Their experiences illustrate what growing old in prison does to the human body, under the pressures of constant stress and inadequate medical care.
“We have to acknowledge that incarceration accelerates aging,” said Wanda Bertram, who has written reports for the Prison Policy Initiative about the nation’s rapidly aging prison population.
“Research has found that people in prison aged 59 have a ‘geriatric morbidity’ equal to that of someone on the outside aged 75,” she said, noting that part of those declines can be attributed to unresponsive prison medical care.
Wee, who spent more than 40 years in Angola, from age 23 until his release at age 64, never had any regular healthcare “There never was no quick response to a medical request,” Wee said. “When you called for medical, they would determine if it was an emergency or not. You had to fill out a sick call, and then you had to pay for that.”
Price had a serious condition when was arrested in 1998. He was diagnosed with Hepatitis C at Orleans Parish Prison. Several months later, doctors told him that the virus had cleared on its own—temporarily, as it turned out..“The ladies called me Miracle Man, because the hepatitis just started disappearing out of my system,” Price said.
But, as it turned out, it was a temporary victory. Nearly 20 years later, after his release, doctors told him that his body had harbored Hepatitis C during his entire incarceration. He underwent treatment to clear it.
Incarceration accelerates aging – and prisons bear the costs
More than 1 in 6 of the 30,199 people incarcerated and in Louisiana state prisons are 55 or older, according to data from Louisiana Department of Public Safety & Correction. That’s similar to the national proportion of 55+ prisoners.
But because of the preponderance of lifers at Angola, the rate is twice as high there: one third of the prison’s 4,258 men are over the age of 55.
While incarcerated at Angola, Ronald “DC” Reynolds worked in a hospice unit providing care, where men often complained of serious symptoms with unknown causes. “Once you were diagnosed with something, they had to treat you,” Reynolds said. “But by the time they were diagnosed, it was Stage 4.”
Debilitating illness sets much earlier for incarcerated people when compared with their counterparts in the free world, said Reynolds, who has seen men who arrived in good health require daily assistance within a few decades, becoming unable to walk, bathe or care for themselves. “It costs way more to house a person who’s 80 than one who’s 20,” he said.
Because of that rapid decline, incarcerated people aged 55 and older are considered elderly, and often struggle with chronic disease, Bertram said. Across the nation, about 23% of those incarcerated aged 55 plus have heart disease, diabetes, or arthritis; 62% have high blood pressure, and 57% live with a disability, she said.
“Younger people in prison suffer from those conditions too,” Bertram said, “but older people experience them at much higher rates and that makes their care far more expensive.”
For its aging population, Angola has designated dormitories for men with special medical needs, including those who use wheelchairs and walkers and those whose eyesight has failed. The dorms were modified with ramps in place of steps, high toilet seats, and secure grab bars to assist while taking showers.
For guys who have been granted parole, the extra price tag for those dorms seem excessive, when compared with release.
The costs also reflect how much aging, and death, are accelerated for those behind bars. “Dudes, just get old and die in there, man.” Wee said.
Deficient yet expensive care
Housing an elderly incarcerated person in a Louisiana prison costs between $80,000 and $100,000 per year, about three times the cost of a younger incarcerated person. Much of the increase stems from medications, wheelchairs, walkers, hospice care, and frequent hospital trips. Treatments such as Hepatitis C therapy can cost up to $40,000 per course, according to a report by the American Civil Liberties Union.
Still, the care given to elders in prisons is a fraction of what’s actually needed, court records show.
In the spring of 2021, U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick found that Angola’s medical care system violated the U.S. Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Prison officials, the judge found, were deliberately indifferent to incarcerated people’s serious medical needs, routinely delaying or denying access to care.
In 2015, lawyers for the Promise of Justice Initiative filed a federal class action lawsuit on behalf of people incarcerated in Angola. The suit alleged that the prison failed to provide timely and adequate medical treatment, putting incarcerated people at risk of serious harm and death, in violation of the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment and federal disability law. The case has led to Judge Dick’s findings of unconstitutional medical care and orders to reform Angola’s healthcare system.
Even as Angola’s population aged, its patients were once closed off from visitors, Reynolds said, leaving sick people feeling isolated and abandoned. “Incarcerated men weren’t even allowed to visit the hospital ward because what was taking place over there was so shocking to the conscience,” he said. “Those men were lying in waste, and a lot of times they didn’t die from the illness they had, they died from infection, from no reason to live, from no one coming to see them,”
Men who spent time in the hospital as patients described it as a nightmare that you never wake up from, Reynolds said. Similar situations exist in prisons across the nation. “Prisons are in no way equipped for the task of caring for elderly people,” Bertram said. “Many prisons have units dedicated to housing the elderly or people with serious illnesses, but these wings are themselves unclean and punishing places.”
Thirty years ago, programs like Angola’s hospice were founded, to restore some dignity to those dying inside, Reynolds said. “The objective of the hospice program in Angola was to make sure nobody died alone,” he said. “We’d be at the bedside 24-7, especially after the doctor gave them a certain timeframe to live. After they passed, we cleaned their bodies, tagged them, and even buried them.”
For Louisiana’s elderly lifers, there are few meaningful pathways to leave prison. Although the state’s 2017 criminal justice reforms reduced incarceration overall, they did little to relieve long sentences. As a result, the state’s aging prison population continues to grow, according to Thomas Arcenaux, who outlined the state’s history of limited compassionate release in a 2024 LSU Law Journal for Social Justice & Policy.
As Reynolds sees men become weaker and the costs for their care rise, he sees the wisdom of compassionate release, which is often described as medical parole. “Do I believe prisons are necessary? Absolutely,” Reynolds said. “But do I think people should stay there until the day they die? That’s a question I battle with.”
After studying the issue, Bertram believes that the best way for states to improve care for people in fragile health and to save money for correctional systems is to pursue policies that allow more older people in prison to go home.
Wee shares that opinion, as he thinks about the frail, elderly people he left behind. “They’re not a threat to society no more,” he said.
