LANSING — People in prison deemed “medically frail” and near the end of their lives can be released on parole under a bipartisan law signed by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and supported by corrections officials and civil rights advocates.
“Medical parole allows MDOC to get out of the business of hospice and nursing care while shifting the costs of that care from 100 percent General Fund to Medicaid, Medicare, or private insurance,” Jazmine Wells, of Safe & Just Michigan, told a state senate committee earlier this year.
National data shows Michigan has one of the oldest prisoner populations in the nation, with as many as half the 35,000 people incarcerated age 50 or older.
And just like on the outside, the cost of care of for the elderly is rising inside prison, too.
In 2012, Michigan Department of Corrections records show, the state spent an average of $6,611 per prisoner on health care; by 2018, that figure was $9,076, which then climbed to $11,012 in 2022.
Incarcerated people undergoing specialized treatment for cancer, heart disease, hepatitis C, stroke and dementia can incur costs of $200,000 and $300,000 or more per year, MDOC records show.
An MDOC spokesperson acknowledged Tuesday that cost savings were discussed in legislative hearings, but the legislation was focused on compassionate reform.
“This reform is largely about making sure that folks who are in that last stage of life are able to go through that, hopefully surrounded by friends or family, in a setting that’s appropriate for them,” Kyle Kaminski, MDOC legislative liaison, said.
These settings could include home care, a nursing home or an adult foster care home, Kaminski said.
“There might be some nominal savings for the State of Michigan by not having to oversee that care in a correctional setting but that really hasn’t been the focus of the legislation,” Kaminski said.
The state now spends about $300 million annually on prisoner healthcare, much of it on patients who could qualify for Medicaid if they were not incarcerated.
Incarcerated people are ineligible for Medicaid due to a federal law known as the Medicaid Inmate Exclusion Policy.
“People ask how we deal with a population that’s elderly and the big thing I tell them is, you have to push hope,” Warden Bryan Morrison of Lakeland Correctional Facility in Coldwater, told the Record-Eagle last year.
“When you’re 80 years old and you’ve been incarcerated for 55, maybe 60 years, you have to give them a purpose,” Morrison said.
Lakeland was particularly hard-hit by COVID-19, Morrison said.
Twenty people incarcerated there during the pandemic, most of them elderly, died of the disease and are memorialized with a plaque, paid for with money from a prisoner benefit fund, installed in the prison’s garden.
To critics of spending taxpayer money on care for people convicted of one or more crimes, Morrison points out the MDOC is obligated to provide this care.
The U.S. Constitution, as stated in a 1976 Supreme Court case, Estelle v. Gamble, requires prison officials to provide adequate medical care to people incarcerated in state and federal prisons.
The new law Whitmer signed last week is a technical fix to parole legislation passed in 2019, that was designed to address the growing number of prisoners who were either dying or physically incapacitated.
The 2019 law, drafted with input from MDOC, was supported by both budget-conscious lawmakers and family members of incarcerated people, but had implementation issues.
At that time, MDOC estimated rule changes would make between 20 and 30 incarcerated people eligible for parole, with many more expected to qualify in subsequent months and years.
Kaminski said this was a good-faith estimate and would have likely been accurate if the law had worked as intended.
That didn’t happen though, and the previous legislation, while well-intentioned, failed to deliver on its promise.
“We are aware of only one parole to date under this statute,” Wells, of Safe & Just Michigan, said, in a letter to members of Michigan Senate’s Civil Rights, Judiciary, and Public Safety committee.
Safe & Just Michigan is a Lansing-based nonprofit organization, working with businesses, faith leaders, law enforcement and formerly incarcerated people, on safety and justice issues.
The 2019 legislation required those paroled as medically frail, to live in a medical facility, and the facility had to first consent to accepting an incarcerated person.
The new bill, which Kaminski said the MDOC had substantial input on, allows people on parole to also live outside of a medical facility, such as with family members as caretakers, as long as this is approved by the state.
The law provides for MDOC to have some discretion over the process, and to authorize use of tethers or other conditions of release, when corrections staff deems this necessary.
“The law reflects that they don’t need to be in a prison when they have that level of medical frailty,” Kaminski said.