Here’s What Happens as the Era of Mass Incarceration Winds Down

By Ginia Bellafante

On March 31, 2023

In 2004, Charles Bryant, then a father in his 30s, was arrested in the Bronx with not quite 50 grams of crack — a quantity roughly equal to four robust pats of butter. He was charged with conspiracy to distribute narcotics, and based on policies established at the height of the war on drugs, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison. The timing seemed especially ill-fated, given that the United States Sentencing Commission that year was again calling attention to the racial disparities produced by what was known as the 100-to-1 rule. This meant that the same sentence would be applied to a dealer holding 50 grams of crack as the one selling 100 times that amount in cocaine, enough to fill a briefcase, privileging the high roller who sold powder to bond traders getting high in the bathroom at Raoul’s and crushing the corner hustler who funneled its cheaper derivative to the poor.

The consequences, widely chronicled, were devastating. In 1986, before the advent of federal mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses, the average federal prison sentence for African Americans charged with these crimes was 11 percent longer than it was for whites; by 1990, it was 49 percent longer, according to a report by the American Civil Liberties Union. In 2006, four years before the 100-to-1 rule was revised, 80 percent of defendants sentenced for crack offenses were African American, even though two-thirds of users were white or Hispanic.

The entwined crack and crime epidemics that unfolded during the 1980s and 1990s and the various attempts to curb them left a catalog of destabilizing legacies, the most recent chapter of which is playing out in a national crisis around aging in the penal system, and out of it. Data from the Osborne Association, a nonprofit that has advocated for those in and around the New York state correctional system for 90 years, suggests that by 2030, the population of prisoners 50 and older will account for one-third of all incarcerated people in the country — an increase of 4,400 percent over a span of a half-century.

Decades of mass incarceration have resulted in a prison population growing older and more enfeebled, and has introduced the challenge of reintegrating people coming out after long sentences, often with few skills, into a society that technology has made alienatingly unfamiliar.

In New York, freedom is almost always compromised by the obscenities of the housing market. To meet this challenge, last June, the Osborne Association opened a residence in part of a new building within the Marcus Garvey housing complex in Brownsville, Brooklyn, specifically for people over 50 exiting long prison terms. Men and women who find themselves in this situation are among the most vulnerable to homelessness, but housing built around their specific needs is exceedingly rare, and the Osborne model is the first of its kind in New York.

Beyond the rooms themselves, the facility provides psychological counseling, drug counseling, connections to doctors, job placement and so on. The objective is to scale the program up in other places in the city and state and serve as a blueprint for what might be done around the country.

On most days at Osborne there are classes and events — bingo, painting, Narcan training, puppy therapy — that bring residents together. “Older people are among the most socially isolated after release from prison,” said Bruce Western, the chair of the sociology department at Columbia University and an expert on re-entry. In his research he found that they have the least support coming home — both in terms of financial and emotional help. “Some people were in prison repeatedly or for long periods of time, and families often cannot sustain the relationships.”

Charles Bryant did not have this problem. When he came home from prison in August 2021 at the age of 56, he was welcomed by family who had been there for him the whole way. In October, he moved into one of Osborne’s 52 small, furnished apartments where everyone who arrives is given $550 in grocery and gift cards to help them get settled. In prison he had worked as a custodian, and Osborne was able to give him a job doing maintenance.

Mr. Bryant left prison 10 years earlier than his original sentence dictated. Recently there has been increasing political interest moving older people out more quickly. Early last year, New York State’s comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli, issued a report urging legislators to find ways to continue to reduce the state’s prison population through the release of older prisoners.

“Accelerated aging” is a term frequently used in corrections circles to describe how the stresses and deficiencies of prison life leave people physically older than their chronological age. Although people over 50 are not nearly as likely to become repeat offenders as their younger cohort leaving the system, they re-enter civilian life with even less infrastructure to ease their passage. Keeping people in their 50s and 60s incarcerated with a litany of medical needs was an expensive proposition — and to whose benefit?

The first person selected to live in the Osborne apartments was a 51-year-old man named José Vega, who had been convicted on a murder conspiracy charge in 1994 and ended up spending 23 years and 10 months in various prisons upstate. Because he had been shot in a traffic argument when he was 21 that left him paraplegic, he required about 30 catheters every week. In 1997 he sued the state corrections department after guards regularly failed to replace them — giving him dishwashing soap to clean the only catheter he had. He was eventually awarded $10,000 when the suit was settled in 2003. Still, he remained in prison for another 15 years.

Although he could live with his mother when he got out, the arrangement was complicated by the fact that the elevator would often break down in her Crown Heights building, leaving him stranded. Through his involvement with the Health Justice Network, he met Christina Green, the director of the Osborne program, in a Zoom meeting. She encouraged him to move in and when he arrived he showed himself to be an enthusiastic decorator — a maximalist.

In late August 1987, Jamie Morton, who was living in Syracuse, drove his wife to work, came home and got into a dispute with his neighbor that resulted in a fatal stabbing. “I called the police and I told them that I had murdered someone and that I would be turning myself in, in due time,” he told me. “But then I drove to Rochester.” He had been drinking, was having trouble holding down a job and briefly considered going on a rampage at the engineering firm where he had been fired. He was 29 and had experienced a moment of madness, he said. “I was armed, ready and deadly insane but I just couldn’t do it.”

The nature of the originating crime weighs heavily with parole boards, meaning that years of good behavior in prison do not necessarily translate into early release. Most of Mr. Morton’s infractions in prison occurred during his first 10 to 15 years. Between 2012, at which point he had already spent a quarter century in prison, and 2021, he came up for parole six times. He moved into the Osborne house seven months ago, and he has proudly conquered the city’s mass transit system. He said he has struggled with severe bouts of depression since his release but is now finding the support he needs. At 64, he is living in New York for the first time.

On the day I met Mr. Morton at Osborne, there was a cooking class in progress taught by a woman living there named Carmella Cintron who was showing everyone how to make turkey chili. Her voice was soft and her affect was gentle; she used a walker that she called her jitney. In 1997, when she was 38, she bludgeoned her 81-year-old neighbor to death in Williamsburg, as the woman returned home from Mass.

Ms. Cintron, who is now 63, had been struggling with untreated mental illness and heard voices, she explained later. She confessed to the crime right away and went to prison for 14 years. Re-entry was very scary in the beginning, she told me; several living arrangements fell apart. Like everyone I spoke with at Osborne, Ms. Cintron said that the experience of having an apartment was transformative. (Residents must pay rent, but it is adjusted to be no greater than one-third of their income, whether that income is from salaried work or other government assistance.)

Another popular class is called Family Values, intended to help residents rebuild ties to their loved ones. It was created, in collaboration with Ms. Green, the program director, by Ronald Harper, whose own path to redemption was circuitous. He was making $200 a week stocking inventory at a camera store in Midtown and not getting by, in the mid 1980s, when crack hit the city hard. He started dealing — first crack and then heroin. In 1992, he landed a 10-month federal prison sentence when he was caught crossing the border from Canada with $25,000 in undeclared cash. Though the experience proved cautionary in the short term, he eventually returned to prior habits after covering his wife’s tuition at Temple University, getting divorced and going broke.

In 1996, he started selling crack again and was bringing in $30,000 to $40,000 a week, he told me. Now living in Virginia, he came up with a boomerang scheme to procure drugs in New York, sell them down south where prices were higher and profit margins were wider, and then haul guns from Virginia, where laws regulating them were looser, up north, where they were not. The operation ran its course when he sold a gun to an undercover agent and went back to prison. When he came out, he started selling drugs again, and again he returned to federal lockup, in 2012. After his release eight years later, he found his calling as a case manager at Osborne. Now 57 and engaged to a psychologist, the jones for the chaos has left him, he told me.

Mr. Harper stood in front of his class as an empathic teacher. He explained how his own children had felt he had abandoned them when he went to prison. Participants nodded; they knew what he meant. One woman said that it was hard to convince her adult son that the street life wasn’t worth it when her own experiences, he felt, did not give her the moral authority to have an opinion. There were so many hurdles to rejoining family life and Mr. Harper was wrestling with the adjustment to a new role in his extended network of dependents, now that he was an ordinary salary man who could no longer come around with extra cash whenever anyone needed it.

The first phase of the movement for criminal justice reform succeeded in persuading the world that society was not improved by keeping low-level offenders, particularly when the offense involved drugs, in jails and prisons and that beyond that, the practice was inhumane. Between 2011 and 2021, the correctional population in this country fell by 22 percent.

But it is easier to solicit sympathy for the young and transgressive than it is for those who have done objectively terrible things no matter how long ago. To the extent that the Osborne experiment can be replicated around the country is really a matter of how far we can extend our compassion to what we may never be able to understand.

“Can we get to a place politically where we can examine these really long sentences for people who committed violent crimes?” Mr. Western, the Columbia professor, asked. “That is the next stage in reversing the whole prison boom of the last four decades. Is there a public safety purpose served by a geriatric prison population?” And if we agree that there is not, what happens next?

This piece was republished from The New York Times.