About 31,000 North Carolina prisoners racked up a $357.4 million bill for health care in fiscal year 2021-2022, an expenditure that ballooned 51 percent over the past 10 years. Nationally, U.S. prisons spent $8.1 billion on prison health care in 2015 alone. In an attempt to reduce the cost of prison health care in North Carolina, the GOP-run legislature in 2023 enacted changes that make early release for medical reasons easier, reports Bolts. Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper signed it. Under North Carolina’s medical release program, prison medical staff or representatives of a prisoner such as a family member or attorney can request that prison officials evaluate someone for medical release. If officials determine that someone meets the criteria, they can refer cases to the state’s governor-appointed parole commission, which makes the final decision.
The changes lowered the age at which prisoners can be released for medical reasons from 65 to 55. To qualify, the prisoner must be so terminally ill, disabled or geriatric that they are medically incapacitated and determined by officials to pose no risk to public safety. They must also have no more than nine months left on their sentence. People serving time for murder, sex offenses, and other violent crimes still cannot apply. Other states have medical release programs, and most codify variations of the same guidelines. On paper, New York allows infirm people convicted of anything besides murder to apply for release if they have served at least half of their sentence, yet prison officials routinely deny hearings for them to make their case. In Wisconsin, people with terminal illness whose sentences allow for parole can seek release after serving 10 years. The increase in life sentences that followed tough-on-crime policies in the 1980s and 1990s has resulted in a graying of the U.S. prison population, leading to swelling medical costs that states are now struggling to address.