Visitors reported rooms full of sick or elderly inmates with threadbare blankets and the windows wide open to the freezing weather.
Here Geidel lived in a unit designed for elderly inmates that more resembled a dormitory, rather than a prison.
Some experts have called for earlier parole for elderly inmates judged to be no threat to society.
Perhaps the ultimate irony was voiced by an elderly black inmate of almost 50 years at Parchman.
New prisons for elderly inmates may be best.
Other problems included elderly inmates wandering off in a "dazed condition" from the home.
As for his being robust and unwilling, surely the usual elderly inmate of an asylum or hospital would be clothed in something more ordinary.
The greatest fear of elderly inmates, Mr. Turley said, is that they will die in prison without at least one night outside.
And he said the state would have to maintain expensive geriatric wards in prisons for elderly inmates who no longer pose a threat to society.
As the number of people in prison goes up so does the number of elderly inmates.