Studies Find Serious Health Impacts on Formerly Incarcerated Older Adults

Interview with Wanda Bertram, communications strategist with the Prison Policy Initiative, conducted by Melinda Tuhus

June 24, 2026

An increasing number of Americans have been imprisoned for longer and longer sentences over the past several decades, due to the government’s so-called “War on Drugs” and politicians who appeal to voters by calling for “tough on crime” policies.

These forces have led to mass incarceration in the U.S. that’s resulted in a prison population that’s now older. Three in every four people who were released from state prisons from 1991 and 2021, more than 12 million people, are over the age of 50 today. Two recent studies measure the negative health and longevity impacts of long-term incarceration later in life.

Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Wanda Bertram, communications strategist with the Prison Policy Initiative. Here she talks about the studies and the recommendations her organization is making to address the problem.

WANDA BERTRAM: We already know quite a bit about how incarceration can impact people’s health. We know that it is an experience that accelerates people’s aging process. We know that if you just look at the mortality rates of people who have been incarcerated versus those who haven’t, people who have a history of having been in prison are likely to die sooner, but that still kind of leaves unanswered this question of what is the experience of people who are older in their later years after incarceration has happened. Because of the way that the sort of curve of mass incarceration has worked with so many people going to prison for long sentences beginning in the ’70s and the ’80s, accelerating in the ’90s and the 2000s, you have a bunch of people who are in recent years have begun to come out of prisons who are older. And so you have now, we estimate over 12 million people in this country who are formerly incarcerated over the age of 50.

MELINDA TUHUS: Can you share some of the specific findings from these studies?

WANDA BERTRAM: So I’ll start with the more recent study that we included in our recap. They’re both by professor Carmen Gutierrez and this most recent one looked at the actual life expectancy of older adults who’ve been incarcerated. And the big standout finding is that men and women ages 51 or older are expected to live about six fewer years than comparable adults who have never been incarcerated. So I say comparable and I mean they controlled for a bunch of different factors: sex, race, socioeconomic factors like income and education level and really they’re trying to isolate the impact of incarceration alone. So it’s about six fewer life years for men and women. There was an earlier study that was tied to the National Latitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, which follows a sample of about 20,000 people who were in grade 7 through 12 in the ’90s. It happened to be that that study also surveyed the health outcomes of those individual’s parents and partners.

The parents and partners, as you might expect at the time that the study was done, many of them were over the age of 50. Among the questions that were asked in the survey was, “Have you been incarcerated?” They looked at parents of people in the study who were over the age of 50 and they looked at partners of parents in the study who were over the age of 50. The parents were mostly women. The partners were mostly men. In the sample that was mostly mothers, they found higher rates of stroke, heart disease, cancer, chronic lung disease, depression, and just generally reporting poor or fair health compared to good or very good health. Just to give one of these numbers, about 48 percent of the women in this sample, remember all formerly incarcerated women said that they had poor or fair health. About 38 percent of these women said that they had chronic lung disease.

That tracks with something else that we know about incarcerated people, which is that they have higher rates of asthma and COPD. And that’s something that is probably to a certain extent about the demographics of who goes to prison and it’s partly the impact of being in an environment that has things like mold and where the air is not circulated very well and things like that.

Moving on to the survey of partners, which were mostly men. We have again, higher rates of cancer, higher rates of depression, lung disease, higher rates of disability in the incarcerated population. Formerly incarcerated people also report more difficulty with just daily life, activities of daily life like just moving around. So what we’re seeing, if you look at the big picture is a population of people who are generally in poorer health than folks who have never been incarcerated. And again, I think this is partly about sort of a self-selection process of who goes to prison.

People who tend to be from communities that have received poorer healthcare, communities that tend to be lower income, have less educational opportunities, often are victimized by environmental injustices, pollution. And then some of it can also be explained by the fact that prison makes people sicker.

MELINDA TUHUS: Wanda Bertram, what are some of the recommendations the Prison Policy Initiative is making in light of these findings?

WANDA BERTRAM: To reduce sentences, to stop sending people to prison for such inordinately long periods of time as this country does, to stop just by default, having mandatory minimums that require people go to prison for decades. That’s not just something that we believe is fair and just and would make the society a better place. It’s also something that would improve people’s health. To get specifically at what do you do to help the population of people who are in this cohort? I mean, I think a big one has to be insurance. People coming out of prison often don’t have health insurance. And one of the great injustices, in my opinion, is that people go into prison who were on Medicaid. Medicaid has a policy that says you can’t be covered by Medicaid while you’re incarcerated because the prison’s already taking care of you. And so by default, they kick people off of Medicaid.

For more information, visit the Prison Policy Initiative at prisonpolicy.org.

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