by MICHAEL STOTHARD
From his battered wheelchair, 87-year-old Melville Atkinson can barely see over the mounds of razor wire heaped against the prison’s perimeter fence.
After 21 years in jail for a sexual assault, the second world war veteran has been placed in a special prison for geriatric inmates, Deerfield Correctional Centre, located on the wooded border where Virginia meets North Carolina.
Mr Atkinson and his elderly fellow inmates are at the centre of a shifting US debate: how to reconcile the fast-rising costs of keeping the old and the sick behind bars with long-standing public support for lifetime sentences.
Older prisoners like Mr Atkinson require specialist diets, medication and round-the-clock nursing – at an average cost of $70,000 a year, three times that of regular inmates, according to the Pew Center on the States, a think tank. Some cost as much as $1m a year.
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