The days was cool and Fall charged forward to push Summer aside. The parking lot to the prison was far down the driveway and the double lined barbed wire fences marked the path to the entry way. I felt at home.  

I had worked as a physician in a jail close to my home and spent several nights performing intake exams on incarcerated patients. I perform multiple pelvic exams on female patients to check for sexually transmitted diseases and undetected pregnancies. I heard the sobs of mothers missing their children and the nonregrets of hung over women with substance use disorder stating that their eleven children were with the Amish. The campus housed 10,000 inmates at one time although it had the legal capacity of 6000.  The stretcher calls were daunting at times when I had to enter the slaveship housing of fifty inmates to retrieve one who had collapsed from dehydration likely due to the insensible losses from drug withdrawl.  

But today I was interviewing for a staff physician at a maximum security prison surrounded by farm-like acres of fertile and untilled land. The massive structure housed 3300 inmates but had the capacity for 3850 persons. Time ticked by for many of them who had been incarcerated since the Carter presidency and likely in the prison system since Dr Martin Luther King. One of the inmates was a former black panther and was approaching ninety years old after being incarcerated for 49 years. 

The aging in place does not occur only in a house with drawn curtains and manicured yards. The aging can occur in a mortared building designed to entomb the person until their death.

At one point when the sentenced was maxed out,” as the inmates would say, the now ex-offender was released and free from parole. But after twenty or thirty years where do they go? What relatives are alive and  what affordable housing exists? Since at the time of their lock up, housing was 500 dollars a month not 2000 dollars or more. Even a room used to cost maybe 100 dollars a week not 1000 dollars a month. When gang members have long memories and no room for forgiveness, an ex-offender is afraid to return to their neighborhood for fear of being murdered for the death of the person for which they were sentenced and completed their time. Where does this person live now? The releasing officer, in an effort to protect the person, has no choice but to drop them off in a neighborhood far away and like a dog disowned, left to survive on the streets, hoping to not reoffend and increase the rate of recidivism, to only  return to the mortared building on the farm-like estate with 3300 roomates.