A 78-year-old man in failing health costs New Jersey taxpayers up to two million dollars a year to keep locked up. He poses almost no threat to anyone. That’s the blunt argument at the center of a recent NJ Spotlight News op-ed written by Joseph Krakora, New Jersey’s former Public Defender.
New Jersey Is Paying Millions to Keep Grandfathers Behind Bars Who Will Never Commit Another Crime
A 78-year-old man in failing health costs New Jersey taxpayers up to two million dollars a year to keep locked up. He poses almost no threat to anyone. That’s the blunt argument at the center of a recent NJ Spotlight News op-ed written by Joseph Krakora, New Jersey’s former Public Defender.
Krakora is making the case that the state’s aging prison population is a direct, predictable consequence of sentencing laws written decades ago for a very different moment in American criminal justice.
The roots of this problem trace back further than most people realize, straight to a single, tragic event in 1986. College basketball star Len Bias died of a cocaine overdose just days after being drafted by the Boston Celtics, and Congress responded within months by passing the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, commonly known as the Len Bias Law. That federal law fundamentally reshaped American sentencing, introducing rigid mandatory minimums tied strictly to drug weight and shifting the entire philosophy of criminal justice away from rehabilitation and toward pure punishment. States rushed to follow Washington’s lead throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, and New Jersey was no exception.
Two specific New Jersey laws carry the weight of this legacy today. The No Early Release Act, passed in 1997, requires anyone convicted of a first or second degree violent crime to serve at least 85 percent of their sentence before even becoming eligible for parole, a dramatic shift from the one-third threshold that existed before it. Mandatory minimums and three-strikes provisions went even further, stripping judges of the discretion to weigh a defendant’s age, background, or actual role in a crime, forcing rigid, largely unappealable sentences regardless of individual circumstances.
Decades later, the people caught in that first wave of mandatory sentencing are now old, and often genuinely sick. Those in their fifties are serving average sentences of 15 years. Those over 60 are averaging 20. This isn’t a small, marginal population anymore. It’s a genuine, structural feature of the state’s prison system.
Krakora’s argument isn’t for blanket, unvetted release of every elderly inmate. It’s for a structured legal pathway, backed by the state’s own Criminal Sentencing and Disposition Commission, that would let rehabilitated older individuals petition a judge for early or geriatric release. The case rests on two pillars. First, the well-documented criminal justice phenomenon of aging out, where recidivism rates for people over 60 drop to somewhere between one and three percent, a genuinely tiny fraction compared to younger offender populations. Second, the sheer financial burden, since housing a medically fragile elderly inmate can run as high as two million dollars annually per person, driven largely by specialized medical care and the overtime costs of corrections officers accompanying inmates on hospital visits.
The specific legislative fix advocates are pushing for is the stalled Rehabilitative Release Bill, which would create a presumption of release for inmates over 60 who’ve served at least 20 years, or those over 62 who’ve served 30 years in murder cases, unless a prosecutor can affirmatively prove the individual still poses an active danger. That’s a meaningfully different structure than automatic release. The burden would still sit with the state to justify continued incarceration, not simply hand it over on a fixed timeline.
There’s a genuinely uncomfortable financial angle running underneath all of this too, and it’s worth understanding plainly. New Jersey explicitly banned private state prisons within its own borders, but private correctional entities still shape this landscape in a real way through what’s often called cherry-picking. Historically, large private prison corporations have lobbied hard for exactly the kind of strict sentencing and mandatory minimum laws driving this crisis, since more people serving longer sentences means more guaranteed revenue for facilities built around housing bodies rather than rehabilitating people. At the same time, those same private operators typically build contracts specifically designed to avoid the most expensive population, writing clauses that let them transfer sick, elderly, or medically complex inmates back to state-run facilities the moment their care becomes costly. The state ends up holding the bill for the most expensive, hardest-to-manage population, while private contractors keep their margins healthy managing younger, healthier inmates and profiting on secondary markets like medical transportation and halfway house management.
Krakora has been unambiguous about where he stands. As the state’s former Public Defender, he views mandatory minimums as an outdated, broken policy that does nothing measurable to deter crime while actively draining the state budget and destabilizing communities that lose elderly family members to a system with no meaningful path home. He’s pointed directly at what he sees as a real hypocrisy, a state that prides itself on progressive criminal justice policy while continuing to warehouse frail 60, 70, and 80-year-olds who pose essentially zero risk of reoffending.
It’s worth being fair to the other side of this argument too, even though the op-ed itself doesn’t spend much time there.
The Case Against Loosening These Laws
The Case for Reform
That’s a genuine, values-based disagreement rather than a factual one, and reasonable people can land on different sides of it even while agreeing on the underlying cost and recidivism data.
What’s harder to dispute is the math itself. Whether or not you think a 78-year-old who committed a violent crime forty years ago has fully paid his debt to society, the state is currently spending millions of dollars a year on individuals whose actual risk to public safety a wide body of criminal justice research puts in the low single digits. That gap, between what New Jersey is paying and what New Jersey is actually getting in return for that spending, is exactly the question the Rehabilitative Release Bill is trying to force lawmakers to finally answer.
