Pension or penitentiary?

Talk about a cry for help: Timothy J. Bowers robbed a Columbus, Ohio, bank of $80, handed the money over to a security guard, and waited for the police to come and arrest him. In court on October 11, he pleaded guilty and told the judge that he would like a three-year sentence--just enough time to get him to the age of eligibility for full Social Security benefits. The judge graciously obliged, demonstrating compassionate conservatism at its warmhearted best.

Bowers, almost sixty-three years old, is no wacko. He passed a court-ordered psychological exam and explained that he had not been able to find a new job since his old one ended when his employer's company closed in 2003.

"At my age, the jobs available to me are minimum wage jobs," he said, adding, "There is age discrimination out there."

Bowers had hit another kind of "doughnut hole," like the one that plagues Medicare recipients: He was "too old" for the above-minimum-wage workforce and too young for full Social Security. Thanks to rampant age discrimination, "too old" can mean as young as forty-five.

Leaving aside the obvious disadvantages of incarceration--having to pee in public, being unable to send out for pizza, etc.--Bowers made a perfectly rational choice. The minimum wage in Ohio is $5.15 an hour, or $824 a month before taxes, which won't get you much of a dwelling space in Columbus, at least not if you intend to maintain a regular schedule of meals. Prison, on the other hand, offers a free bed, free food, and, however inadequate, free health care. Bowers could have applied for a Section 8 housing voucher, but the waiting list for those exceeds, in some cities, his three-year prison term.

We can expect a rash of similar bank robberies as the middle aged seek ways to wait out the years between the onset of age discrimination and the arrival of their first Social Security check.

There's nothing new about using prison as a solution to poverty. More than two million Americans are currently incarcerated, the great majority of them from the lowest income brackets.

In fact, incarceration is expanding as the welfare state shrinks: While the U.S. offers two million prison beds, it provides public housing to only 1.3 million households, and that number is dropping rapidly.

We are fast reaching the point, if we have not passed it already, where the largest public housing program in America will be our penitentiary system.

If Bowers's choice was rational, the same cannot be said of our social policies. The cost of incarcerating an elderly inmate is about $69,000 a year. A compassionate--or merely rational--state would give Bowers a stipend to live on and save its prison beds for actual bad guys.

Barbara Ehrenreich is a columnist for The Progressive. Her latest book is "Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream." Her website is www.barbaraehrenreich.com. She has founded United Professionals, a nonprofit group to protect the middle class and to reach out to the unemployed, underemployed, and anxiously employed. To find out more, go to www. unitedprofessionals.org.