Trans-incarceration: Reimagining confinement and the criminality of aging

As the U.S. population continues to age and will require increasing levels of care, scholars continue to question what conventional methods of "custodial care" and rehabilitation accomplish for the individuals receiving them, relative to those providing them. To this end, critical discourse surrounding the spatial institutionalization of older adults argues that formal institutions of care and rehabilitation are simply alternative and synonymous forms of incarceration and imprisonment. Using semi-structured interviews with ten male residents of a Rhode Island nursing home and ten incarcerated males at the Rhode Island state prison's medium security unit, this work explores the following questions within the existing scholarship of the medical sociology of confinement and incarceration: In what ways are experiences of confinement alike for older adults living in prisons and for those living in nursing homes, and what do these similarities/differences imply about aging, disabled, and economically unproductive bodies as "deviant" and subsequently "criminal" as the traditional definition of the carceral space expands? Participant responses across the nursing home and prison settings fit into three categories, including "home as historical/home as negation," "institution as escape," and "self as non-human/self as non-agent." As a result, there exist thematic consistencies amidst the subjective experiences of older adults across settings of confinement that argue for a shared "criminality" socially assigned to an aging body.