At My Alabama Prison, One Man Is Doing Time With His Grandson

A guest writer asks "Why can’t older people, who have vanishingly low recidivism rates, be released from prison?"

WRITTEN BY: Richard Fox

This story was published in partnership with Prison Journalism Project, a national nonprofit organization which trains incarcerated writers in journalism and publishes their work. Sign up for PJP’s newsletter, follow them on Instagram and Bluesky, or connect with them on LinkedIn.

For many Alabamians, the “golden years” means playing with grandkids, porch sitting and traveling. But these opportunities couldn’t be farther from reality for my senior citizen friends and I, who are locked up in a state prison.

Consider my buddy Randy Matkins, 67, who has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and suffers from depression. Matkins has been incarcerated more than 40 years, so long that he is now doing time with one of his grandsons.

Another friend, Mitch Rutledge, 65, has congestive heart failure and arthritis. Rutledge was arrested at 21 years old and is starting to fear that he will never have a family of his own.

“When you realize you have lost your youth, it’s a scary thing,” Rutledge said.

Meanwhile, Robert Woods, 67, has diabetes and high blood pressure; he is also a leg amputee. After 40 years behind bars, Woods’ dreams are modest: He wants to have safety handrails installed in prison showers.

“I’m not the only one,” Woods said. “Others need these rails.”

We don’t live at a nursing facility or an assisted living center where the staff is trained to take care of an aging population and the residents are all roughly in the same stage of life. We reside at William E. Donaldson Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison outside of Birmingham that holds just over 1,300 people. In the words of the Alabama Department of Corrections, our prison “specializes in controlling repeat and/or multiple violent offenders with lengthy sentences that are behaviorally difficult to manage.”

But my friends and I rocking on our proverbial rockers? The only thing that’s difficult to manage is our health.

We see our remaining years through razor wire fences, over cinder block walls and surrounded by chaos and violence. Close to 24 people died at our prison last year. We feel forgotten by family and friends because it’s often too difficult to maintain relationships. And many of us suffer in small, isolated rooms on hard cots before we die alone.

But it does not have to be this way.

Last year, the Alabama Legislature considered House Bill 299, which would have given weighted consideration to a person’s age and health in parole decisions. Currently, people in Alabama prisons can wait up to five years to be reconsidered for parole after a denial. The bill would have shortened the waiting period down to two years maximum for people 60 and older who have served at least 10 years of their sentence. Also, if the parole board denied parole to an elderly or sick incarcerated person, the bill would provide the incarcerated person with the ability to appeal their parole denial.

Unsurprisingly, the bill failed to pass, and no bills this session have built positively on its momentum. There’s only one bill related to elder parole this year, and it is still being considered by the Legislature. That bill makes the thresholds for elder parole tougher to reach than HB299 did, requiring you to be 65 years old and 25 years into a prison sentence to be considered.

What most Alabamians don’t know is that older people are ideal candidates for parole. They generally pose the lowest risk of repeating crimes for any age group. According to Vera Institute of Justice, the recidivism rate for people 55 and older is around 2%, and it’s almost zero for people 65 and older.

Alabama offers medical furloughs and medical parole for applicable senior cases, but the state has rarely used either of those mechanisms to send aging people home. Alabama’s parole rates have become notoriously low, dropping from 53% in 2018 all the way down to 8% in 2023, before climbing up to 20% as of last October. In 2023, the parole board reviewed applications for 185 people 65 and older, but only approved parole for six of them, according to AL.com.

In cases where the state’s parole board denies medical parole, Alabama’s prison commissioner can still free someone through medical furlough. But over roughly the last 10 years, the state has only released an average of seven people per year through medical furlough, according to AL.com.

Alabama’s prison commissioner has acknowledged the need to increase parole in the state, saying in a 2024 story from The Alabama Reflector: “We would like to see more individuals get an opportunity to get out.”

A report by Alabama Appleseed titled “Unsustainable” shows that since 2000, the population of people 60 and older in Alabama prisons has risen from 85 people to 2,393 people — about 11% of the state prison population.

What’s more, the cost of caring for this aging prison population has ballooned. In 2000, the average spending per prisoner in Alabama was $25.47 per day, or around $9,300 per year. By 2022, that cost grew to $82.64 per day, or roughly $30,163 per year. Much of the increase is due to more people growing older, getting sicker and staying incarcerated longer.

“Incarceration itself accelerates aging,” reads a Prison Policy Initiative report from 2023. “It doesn’t make sense to spend so much money locking people up in places that are not only dangerous to their health, but more costly to care for them — especially when there is little public safety argument to justify doing so.”

As someone who has been incarcerated for decades, I can say this: We know we are here because we made bad decisions, breaking laws, harming others and destroying people’s trust. We don’t want to diminish our actions, and we understand we are paying our debt to society. But we also believe there has to be a more humane and cost-effective way to handle the aging prison population.

If you could meet people like Randy, whom I mentioned above, you would understand why a man with his health conditions at his age — who also has two daughters, six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren — wants to come home. He says he feels “truly blessed” to have made it to 67 with compromised lungs but a sound mind.

Still, he asks: “How much longer, God?”