How about you stop treating drug problems as crime and treat drug addiction like the HEALTH issue that it is? How about letting ALL the people whose only crime was possession of marijuana or sale of marijuana out of jail?

Razor wire topping the fences seems almost a joke at the Men’s State Prison, where many inmates are slumped in wheelchairs, or leaning on walkers or canes.

It’s becoming an increasingly common sight: geriatric inmates spending their waning days behind bars. The soaring number of aging inmates is now outpacing the prison growth as a whole.

Tough sentencing laws passed in the crime-busting 1980s and 1990s are largely to blame. It’s all fueling an explosion in inmate health costs for cash’strapped states.

“It keeps going up and up,” said Alan Adams, director of Health Services for the Georgia Department of Corrections. “We’ve got some old guys who are too sick to get out of bed. And some of them, they’re going to die inside. The courts say we have to provide care and we do. But that costs money.”

Justice Department statistics show that the number of inmates in federal and state prisons age 55 and older shot up 33 percent from 2000 to 2005, the most recent year for which the data was available. That’s faster than the 9 percent growth overall.

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