Many more older people are leaving prison and face unmet needs for housing and health care − as well as a tangle of groups trying to help

Nearly a quarter of all people in U.S. prisons are 50 or older, like these inmates at FMC Devens in Massachusetts in 2015. Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post via Getty Images

American prisons are rapidly graying.

Following decades of mass incarceration, exacerbated by the U.S. war on drugs, the proportion of older people in prison has increased since the early 1990s. Nearly a quarter of people behind bars in federal and state prisons are over age 50. That’s five times the proportion of the prison population in 1991.