There is an almost unbearable irony in the name SCI Phoenix. The phoenix is among humanity’s most enduring symbols of rebirth. Its meaning spans cultures, religions, nations, and centuries. It’s almost universal and it is of the universe: destruction followed by renewal, death giving way to possibility, the end and then a new beginning.
But inside Skippack, Pennsylvania’s SCI Phoenix, hundreds of aging men live in a system that often refuses to recognize the possibility of rebirth at all.
The contradiction was impossible to ignore on late last month, when PA State Senator Amanda Cappelletti, State Senator Sharif Street (and many other lawmakers) joined the Gray Panthers and other legislators, advocates, corrections officials, activists, and incarcerated people for a bipartisan legislative geriatric seminar focused on House Bill 1550 and the crisis of aging inside PA prisons. It was, in its own way, a back-to-school moment for the citizens of PA.
The lesson was simple: We cannot continue sentencing elderly people to die in prison without creating a meaningful process for determining who among them can return home. HB 1550, introduced by Street and Cappelleti with 20 sponsors, asks PA to do something remarkably modest: Judge people as the human beings they are today, not exclusively as the people they were decades ago.
The Gray Panthers have helped give us an essential vocabulary for understanding what is happening inside PA’s prisons: DBI — death by incarceration. We should learn that acronym. We should say it plainly.
Behind prison walls, Pennsylvania is creating an expanding population of elderly people whose incarceration increasingly resembles state-funded end-of-life confinement.
For thousands of Pennsylvanians, the sentence means growing old inside a correctional institution and remaining there until death, regardless of transformation, rehabilitation, declining physical capacity, or the number of decades already served.
At SCI Phoenix, we heard from men who have been incarcerated for 35, 40, nearly 50 years. They are part of an aging prison population increasingly confronting dementia, cancer, chronic illness, reduced mobility, hospice care, wheelchairs, specialist appointments, and the many other realities that accompany old age. These are humanitarian questions, but they are also questions of public policy and the public good.
Older incarcerated people require more medical care than younger populations. Prisons were not designed to function as nursing homes, long-term care facilities, or hospices. PA taxpayers are paying for this. At some point we must ask the obvious question: What public-safety purpose is served by incarcerating elderly people who may present little meaningful risk to the public? Surely we are capable of vetting our elders through an adjudication-adjacent process.
Accountability and compassion
Research on aging and crime has long established the general pattern that criminal offending declines significantly with age. That does not mean every elderly incarcerated person should be released. It means age and decades of demonstrated rehabilitation are relevant to risk — and our laws should be capable of recognizing that fact. HB 1550 is important because it demands thinking about the human condition, how we treat people and whether or not we respect our elders as human beings.
Statistics alone cannot convey what DBI means. Charles Kareem Diggs, 76 years old, has been continuously incarcerated since 1976. He spoke with extraordinary historical perspective, reaching back to PA’s Quaker origins and the philosophical foundations of the penitentiary itself.
The original ideal, however imperfectly realized, contained concepts of penitence, reflection, repentance, and ultimately redemption. Diggs forced the room to confront how far PA’s contemporary carceral system has drifted from even those aspirations. If there is no possibility of redemption, what exactly is correction supposed to mean?
Diggs also reminded us that crime and punishment are more complicated than our political rhetoric allows. Sometimes victims and offenders belong to the same families. Sometimes survivors themselves support commutation or reconsideration of sentences. Sometimes the people closest to the original harm develop understandings of justice, accountability, mercy, and healing that our political system refuses to accommodate.
What public-safety purpose is served by incarcerating elderly people who may present little meaningful risk to the public?
Craig Datesman, 70, has been incarcerated since 1982. He focused our attention on another dimension of the crisis: cost. Aging incarcerated people need hospice care, dementia care, mobility assistance, wheelchairs, specialists, medications, and increasingly intensive medical interventions. Datesman spoke about another theme of the program: “Accountability and compassion are not opposing values.”
This should be a guiding principle for criminal justice reform in PA. Accountability does not require cruelty. Compassion does not require abandoning public safety. Redemption does not require forgetting victims. Legislation that establishes a process for geriatric parole does not require guaranteeing anyone release. But we have to move the needle.
Kevin Evans, who has spent approximately 35 years incarcerated, placed the current movement within a longer struggle. He acknowledged elderly incarcerated organizers — living and deceased — whose work created the foundation upon which today’s reform efforts stand. He also recognized legislators, including Senator Street and Senator Art Haywood, who have worked for years to move these issues through Harrisburg. Their demand is simple:
Give us a process.
DBI does not discriminate
The gathering at SCI Phoenix brought together an unusual coalition: incarcerated people, corrections administrators, advocates, community members, legislative staff, and elected officials. Representatives connected to the Pennsylvania Prison Society and multiple legislative offices were present. Senator Cappelletti helped lead the proceedings. The discussion included incarcerated advocates as well as correctional leadership, including Thomas McGinley, superintendent of SCI Coal Township.
That convergence matters. If incarcerated people, prison administrators, advocates, legislators, families, and community organizations can all identify the same structural problem, Harrisburg should pay attention. And PA voters should ask why reform remains so difficult. The politics of crime have distorted criminal justice policy for decades. Individual tragedies have repeatedly been transformed into political weapons, producing laws designed less around evidence than around the fear that an elected official might someday be accused of being “soft on crime.”
The result is policy by anecdote designed for collective punishment. PA cannot continue allowing the punitive response to become the only politically acceptable response. Public safety is too important for that. And so is justice.
This is not exclusively a crisis affecting men. Recent reporting and public discussion around aging women incarcerated at SCI Muncy — including the work surrounding WHYY’s Dying on the Inside — have made clear that elderly women confront many of the same problems: chronic illness, disability, escalating medical needs, decades-long sentences, and a system with few meaningful pathways for reconsideration. DBI does not discriminate by gender.
“Accountability and compassion are not opposing values.”
Behind prison walls, Pennsylvania is creating an expanding population of elderly people whose incarceration increasingly resembles state-funded end-of-life confinement.
PA occupies a foundational place in the history of American incarceration. The very word penitentiary carries the trace of an older aspiration: penitence, contemplation, transformation. The Commonwealth helped build the architecture — literal and philosophical — of the American prison. PA history creates a special responsibility. If PA helped teach America how to imprison, PA can help teach America how to recognize transformation. And that brings us back to the name of the place where this extraordinary gathering occurred.
Phoenix from the flames
What does it mean to name a prison after the world’s great symbol of rebirth while maintaining laws that effectively declare thousands of human beings incapable of being reborn? What does “correction” mean without the possibility that someone can become corrected? What does “rehabilitation” mean if demonstrated rehabilitation can never matter? What does redemption mean when the state refuses even to look for evidence that it has occurred?
Geriatric parole does not require PA to forget crimes, abandon victims, or pretend that accountability does not matter. It asks whether punishment must remain frozen forever, even when the human being being punished has changed beyond recognition. Some people considered under HB 1550 should remain incarcerated. A serious review process will reach that conclusion in appropriate cases. Others should not. The moral failure of the current system is its resistance to making that distinction.
The fiscal failure is forcing taxpayers to spend extraordinary amounts incarcerating people whose age, health, record, and rehabilitation may make continued imprisonment unnecessary. And the democratic failure is allowing decades of fear-driven politics to prevent us from even establishing a rational process for deciding. Pennsylvania does not need to choose between accountability and compassion.
REFORMING OUR PRISONS FOR THE BETTERMENT OF ALL
