But that is where Judith (not her real name) sat for nearly two weeks in April after her family called police because Judith had scratched her husband’s arm, the police arrested her and charged her with an act of domestic violence, and Martin set her bail at $50.

It was the outcome of a chain of decisions that began with Judith becoming involved with the criminal justice system.

“Unfortunately, sometimes you get [the police to] do our part, the judge does their part, and we end up with the result where when you look at it from the outside you go ‘how did we get here,’” Hampden Township Police Chief Steven Junkin said.

On April 26, police were called to Judith’s home in East Pennsboro Township. Her daughter had discovered bruises and scratches on her father’s arms, according to an affidavit of probable cause filed by East Pennsboro Township Police.

When questioned by police, Judith’s husband said Judith would get angry with him and dig her nails into his arm, police said. He said Judith’s anger issues had gotten progressively worse over the last few weeks and he was now afraid to continue living with her, according to the affidavit.

Judith was charged with misdemeanor simple assault and summary harassment. Because the case was considered an act of domestic violence, she was brought in front of Martin for an immediate arraignment.

Judith also could not go home, because the case was domestic violence, so Martin said he set bail at $50 after speaking with her family. He said this was done to hold Judith in Cumberland County Prison overnight while family members made arrangements and prepared to have Judith move in with them.

Martin said family members were supposed to come back the next day.

They didn’t.

So, Judith stayed in prison for nearly two weeks until a family finally came and posted her bail, according to court records. All charges against Judith were ultimately dismissed.

A search of state criminal records shows this is the only charge against the woman who was born during the middle of World War II. In fact, the only other entry under her name in the state database is a speeding ticket from 2015, according to court records.

While it is rare for someone Judith’s age to be charged with a criminal offense and even rarer that a first offense would occur so late in life, it does happen.

Arrests

Between the beginning of 2010 and the end of 2017, nearly 60 people 75 years old or older were charged with criminal offenses in Cumberland County, according to an analysis of court records conducted by The Sentinel.

Of those cases, about a third involved crimes against another person like simple assault, indecent assault or making terroristic threats. Property crimes like retail theft accounted for about 30 percent of all offenses, and DUI accounted for another 22 percent, according to court records.

Defendants over the age of 75 accounted for less than two-tenths of 1 percent of all people charged with a criminal offense, according to court records.

Most of the cases were ultimately dropped.

But what causes people who may have never offended before to commit criminal acts at an advanced age?

One answer may be mental decline and the onset of diseases like Alzheimer’s or dementia.

In 2017, an 85-year-old man assaulted his caregiver and threatened to kill her in Hampden Township. Roughly two years earlier, the man had suffered a stroke.

When questioned by police, the man was confused and said he remembered having an argument with his caregiver, according to an affidavit of probable cause filed by Hampden Township Police. The man said he remembered asking the caregiver to leave, but had no recollection of striking or threatening her, according to police.

In 2015, Pennsylvania State Police responded to a senior living facility in Shippensburg Township where a man with a history of mental illness had become enraged with a neighbor who lived across the hall, and cut his leg with a steak knife, according to an affidavit of probable cause filed by State Police.

A study published in 2015 by Madeleine Liljegren, a doctoral student of oncology and pathology at Lund University, found a strong correlation between a certain kind of dementia and criminal behavior.

Liljegren’s study reviewed the history of more than 2,000 patients at the University of California, San Francisco, Memory and Aging Center and found about 9 percent of those patients committed a criminal offense after their illness occurred.

However, patients facing the onset of behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia were the most at risk of criminal behavior, according to the study. Nearly 40 percent of those patients committed a criminal offense, Liljegren found, compared to about 8 percent of patients with Alzheimer’s.

Behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia heavily affects the area of the brain that controls judgment, empathy and conduct, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.

Police response

There is no official diagnosis listed in the court record for Judith, so it is unknown what role mental health or dementia may have played in the case.

What is known is that the response to her case was a criminal justice response.

Coinciding with the civil rights movement and in response to abuses occurring inside the facilities, the United States began to move away from the use of state mental hospitals in the 1960s, according to Risdon Slate, professor of criminology at Florida Southern University.

Slate said the number of people in mental hospitals fell from a peak of roughly 560,000 in 1955 to less than 40,000 currently nationwide.

The movement was meant to deinstitutionalize people with mental health conditions and provide more dignity to their lives. However, without adequate funding for services in the community, the response to mental health crises has been placed largely on criminal justice systems, Slate said.

“Hospitals will turn people away right and left, particularly private hospitals,” he said. “But jails can’t say no.”

Police have discretion when dealing with a situation, but that discretion generally comes down to the decision of whether to arrest, whether to charge and if charging what offense should they bring, Junkin said. Once charges are filed, magisterial district judges have discretion on how to set bail, which can be the difference in whether a person goes to prison to await trial or goes home.

He said there is little to no option to divert people with clear mental health concerns into social services without first bringing them into the criminal justice system.

“[Police] are that first line,” Junkin said. “Unfortunately, at times, even though there are social services on the books, they are not available to us for one reason or another.”

He said the way services are structured, those interventions are not available until certain criteria are met, like the person being incapable of taking care of themselves or being a threat to themselves or someone else. However, once an incident reaches the level of safety concern, the police may already be called and the criminal justice response already begun.

Junkin likened the response to that of opiate and substance use.

“That’s where we are stuck,” Junkin said. “There is an effective way to get people treatment. Unfortunately, that involves throwing people into the [criminal justice] system. It’s hard.”

While the responsibility to be first responders for these incidents falls on police, that response is not without possible consequences even with the best intentions.

In 2014, an 85-year-old man had to be treated at the hospital after police responded to his home in Middlesex Township for a mental health call.

Officers used multiple cycles of a Taser to attempt to subdue the man and ultimately used a leg sweep and arm bar to place the man in handcuffs, according to a use of force incident report.

No charges were filed against the man, and the officer’s use of force was deemed appropriate by township Public Safety Director Barry Sherman.

“If we don’t want to have a nation of people in jail and we don’t want to have people with mental health issues or the elderly in jail because of mental health issues, we need to have a separate track [of social services rather than criminal justice],’” Junkin said. “Absent that, that is why things come over to [criminal justice]. We’re 24/7, and we’re an established system.”