Colorado is spending more per inmate on health care as the state’s prison population ages, according to a national report released Wednesday.
The report, from the Pew Charitable Trusts, found that Colorado spent $6,641 per inmate on health care in the 2015 fiscal year. That placed the state in the middle of the pack nationally: 21st for the highest spending and about $900 per inmate more than the national median.
In the 2010 fiscal year, Colorado spent $5,807 per inmate on health care, meaning that per-inmate spending increased 14 percent over the five-year span.
The per-inmate tallies do not include health care costs for inmates in private prisons, where the Pew report says nearly 20 percent of the state’s inmates are housed. The figures also don’t include some health care costs of inmates in the custody of the Department of Corrections who were housed in local jails, according to the report.
The increase came as Colorado’s prison population shrunk. In 2010, Colorado’s Department of Corrections had a daily average inmate population of 22,801. By 2015, that number declined to 20,528.
During that same time, however, the population also aged significantly. In 2010, 7.1 percent of the state’s prison inmates were 55 or older. In 2015, that share had risen to 10.6 percent. The shift means Colorado now ranks 17th in the country for the largest percentage of prison inmates 55 or older.
An additional 29.5 percent of inmates in Colorado prisons are between the ages of 40 and 54, according to the report.
The Pew report examines disparities in state prison health spending and tracking, and it found that states in the 2015 fiscal year spent a combined $8.1 billion on health care for more a million inmates. Nationally, Louisiana spent the least on health care in the 2015 fiscal year: $2,173 per inmate. California spent the most: $19,796.
The trend of aging inmates is not unique to Colorado. The report found that the share of older inmates rose between 2010 and 2015 for every state in the country that provided Pew with data on inmate ages. But health care costs also varied based on how well prison systems treated inmates’ chronic conditions and monitored the outcomes of their health care spending.
Maria Schiff, one of the report’s authors, said she hopes lawmakers and correction officials will use the report’s findings to better track the health of inmates, improve treatment and be more efficient with taxpayer dollars.
“The stakes are high,” she said, “because failure is so expensive to all of us.”
