A Content Analysis of United States Compassionate and Geriatric Release Laws: Applying a Human Rights Approach to Global Prisoner Health

Background/Purpose.In recent years, there has been a growing awareness among the corrections community as a human rights issues of housing aging and ill people in prison. Laws the enable their early release from prison, which were designed to facilitate release often based on age, health status, and/or nature of the crime, have been passed or revised to address this issue at the state and federal leve. To date there has been no systematic analysis of these existing laws. This paper fills this gap by analyzing the laws pertaining to the early release of incarcerated people within the US that address advanced age and/or illness and the extent to which these laws are consistent witwere with a human rights framework.  

Methods: In order to identify all of the compassionate and geriatric release (CRG) laws in the United States,  a comprehensive search of the LexisNexis legal database was conducted. The following key word search terms were used: compassionate release, medical parole, geriatric prison release, elderly (or seriously ill) and prison. Identified laws were included in the sample if they met the following criteria: (1) identified aging or seriously ill people in prison and (2) were a law or policy that contained provisions governing prison release. Two trained research assistants reviewed the laws and coded the data. The search located 52 federal and state corrections systems (50 states, Washington D.C, and the Federal Corrections). Of the 52, 47 have some legal procedure or precedent for incarcerated people or their families to petition for early release based on advanced age or health. There was no evidence of any applicable law or provision found in five corrections systems. Interpretive content analysis strategies were used to analyze the compassionate release laws from the United States. Interpretive content analysis is a systematic procedure that codes and analyzes qualitative data, such as the content of published articles or legal laws. A combination of deductive and inductive approaches can be used, and this strategy was used in the current review. Tutty and colleagues' (1996) four-step qualitative data analysis strategies were utilized to analyze this data.

Findings: Of the possible 52 federal and state (50 states, Washington D.C, and Federal Corrections), 47 laws for incarcerated people or their families to petition for early release based on advanced age or health were found. Five key drivers of these laws were identified: (1) physical/mental health state, (2) age, (3) pathway to release decision, (4) post release support, (5) personal and criminal justice history (e.g., discrimination against persons with violent and sex offense histories), and (6) stage of review. 

Conclusion/Implications:This results of this content analysis offers guidance on how to classify and assess CRG policy development or refinement that are more consistent with human rights principles. These principles include respect and honor the dignity of the person, promote the political, civil, social, economic, and cultural rights of all citizens, and ensure nondiscrimination, transparency, and accountability on the part of governments. A checklist for analysis of existing compassionate and geriatric release laws is presented.