RSS Feed MenuOn Sunday, I wrote about Canada’s most notorious serial killer, Clifford Olson, getting an old age pension and income supplement totaling just under $1,200 a month.
Considering that close to 50 of his 70 years of life have been spent in one prison or another, and that he’s likely to die in prison, it seem ludicrous that he’d be entitled to benefits he doesn’t need, doesn’t deserve and hasn’t earned.
In fairness, it should be pointed out that in discussions, Olson sees the absurdity in getting this income. It also raises the question of aging inmates in our prisons.
In the U.S., there are some 35,000 prison inmates who are over 65. Most of them have committed crimes that will never entitle them to parole. In Canadian prisons, there are some 500 federal inmates 65 and over – 1.5% of the prison population. That’s an 87% increase of inmates over 65, since 1993.
On any given day, some 33,500 Canadians are in correctional institutes. The oldest inmate in Canada is 87 – but his name is withheld for “privacy”(?) reasons.
Health costs triple for prisoners over 65; some require 24-hour medical or nursing care. The cost of maintaining an inmate in a federal prison is roughly $87,000 a year – and double that for female prisoners.
The ratio of Canadians in prison is 131 per 100,000. In the U.S. it’s 750 per 100,000 – the highest ratio in the world. The U.S., with 2% of the world’s population, boasts (well, maybe not ”boasts”) 25% of the world’s prison population — assuming Beijing’s and Moscow’s statistics are truthful, (which would be news if they were).
A concern in Canada is the high number of aboriginals who are in prisons. Roughly 4% of Canada’s adult population are aboriginals, as are 21% of the male prison population and 30% of the female prison population.
At the other end of the scale, of 400 inmates of federal prisons who are under 20 years old, about 140 are aboriginals.
As for aging inmates, Corrections Canada initially said it could not reveal the longest serving inmate or the oldest inmate “because these are privacy issues.” What isn’t a privacy issue is America’s oldest and longest-serving inmate.
The U.S.’s oldest death row inmate was Leroy Nash, Arizona State Prison, who died this year at age 94 and had been in prisons since he was 15 - some 80 years behind bars. He died deaf, blind, crippled and with dementia. A burglar, he had killed a cop, a postman, a store clerk.
Another, Charles Friedgood, is 89. As a surgeon, he injected his ailing wife with Demerol in 1976 and was arrested skipping the U.S. with his mistress (with whom he had two kids) and $450,000 of his wife’s money. He is now up for parole because he has terminal cancer which has already cost $300,000 for treatment.
William Heirens, 81, has been in prison 64 years and counting, since he was arrested in 1946 as Chicago’s “Lipstick killer” (death messages he left in lipstick). He killed two women and dismembered a six-year-old for whom he was hoping to collect $20,000 ransom.
Britain’s longest serving prisoner, John Straffen, died in prison after serving 55 years for murdering a schoolgirl.
At age 70, Clifford Olson has already spent more time in prison than any other Canadian and, like a fish in water, has adjusted perfectly to his environment.
MSheridan // Mar 19, 2010 at 6:48 pm
Mr. Worthington, it is with a certain amount of trepidation that I open what may be a can of worms:
Why are you posting these admittedly fascinating pieces on prisoners and the justice system? It isn’t that I didn’t enjoy reading them–I did. More, I agreed with you on the Peltier piece you wrote back on March 8. However, as this is a political site I have to wonder what you are leading up to.
It is unfortunately all too easy to point to flaws in our criminal justice system that need to be fixed (and necessary, too), but you do not appear to be aiming at the large and gaping holes seen by so many, but being deliberately dispassionate in your description (aside from taking the easy shot at the stupidity of Canada providing an old age pension to someone who will never use it). Do you have forthcoming policy suggestions that would fit in with the whole “conservatism that can win again” theme of this site?
BoolaBoola // Mar 19, 2010 at 9:13 pm
The whole idea of prison is an outdated mistake. It’s an expensive, unpredictable, and ineffective method of punishment.
We need to return to quick, inexpensive, terrifying punishments: floggings, pillories, and for severe crimes, amputations.
Seriously, if you had to choose between having a leg amputated vs spending the next thirty years in a bad prison, which would you choose? I would choose amputation in a New York minute, and I bet most people would too. And yet, the amputation, but not the prison, is considered “cruel and unusual”. That’s NUTS!
Carney // Mar 19, 2010 at 11:06 pm
BoolaBoola, I would include physical castration in that list. Instantly removing the libido and aggression from males would go a long way toward preventing recidivism, as well as de-glamorizing criminality among the vulnerable and impressionable.
sinz54 // Mar 20, 2010 at 9:49 am
BoolaBoola: We need to return to quick, inexpensive, terrifying punishments: floggings, pillories, and for severe crimes, amputations.
I agree with you.
In Singapore, you can be flogged for a sufficiently severe crime (and their definition of “severe” is a lot more expansive than ours).
I would have preferred that those terrorists we caught be publicly flogged (televised live on CNN and al-Jazeera, of course), rather than waterboarded in secret.
But in America, flogging would require repeal of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution.
Carney // Mar 20, 2010 at 10:34 am
Whatever Worthington’s intentions, I anticipate lots of articles like this in future, many with a more openly sympathetic tone. I’ve said for years that leftists will not stop at abolishing capital punishment. Even though they often sell it by bundling it with life in prison with no parole, sometimes even by touting the latter as “tougher”, once the death penalty is gone, they swiftly move to make sure that “life” no longer means life, and whip up sympathy for old men in jail so they can be released. Then of course we push the maximum age and time of imprisonment back and back.
Carney // Mar 20, 2010 at 10:37 am
sinz54, I’m pretty sure flogging went on for a long time after the ratification of the 8th amendment, and that its authors and ratifiers had no intention of banning it. What they were thinking of was something much more on their minds as former rebels against the Crown: hanging, drawing and quartering – an unbelievably cruel punishment that lasted into the 18th century.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanged,_drawn_and_quartered