10 Oldest Prisoners in the World

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While it might be difficult to picture someone who is old enough to be a grandparent as a criminal, the  sad reality is that many inmates are senior citizens, especially in the United States. Regardless of how you may personally feel about jailing anyone over 65, all of the people on this list committed punishable crimes. Nearly all of the world’s oldest prisoners died in jail or were released when they were too frail to carry out the rest of their sentence. A few of them are still alive, and one of these old prisoners is actually still serving time and may survive long enough to move to the top of the list.

10. Paul Geidel (April 21, 1894 – May 1, 1987)

 Oldest Age While Imprisoned: 86 years old
 Country of Origin:  Hartford, Connecticut, USA
 Last or Current Prison:  Fishkill Correctional Facility in New York (started out at infamous Sing Sing)
 Time Served:  1911 – 1980 (68 years, 245 days)

photo source:  New York Daily News

Until someone else breaks his record, Paul Geidel currently holds the record for longest prison sentence served in the United States and was even put into the Guinness Book or World Records. Geidel was in prison for over 68 years and had to be convinced to leave – he was granted parole in 1974 but didn’t want to be released.

Geidel, who was orphaned at age 7 and 17 years old at the time of his crime, murdered William Jackson, a resident of an apartment hotel that Geidel had briefly worked at. Naively, Geidel assumed that Jackson had a secret stash of money in his apartment and used chloroform to knock him out and kill him so Geidel could ransack Jackson’s home. Jackson’s next door neighbor was Manhattan district attorney Charles Whitman, who managed to get Geidel to confess. Following his release from prison, Geidel stayed at a nursing home until his death in 1987.

9. Johnson Van Dyke Grigsby (c. February 1886 – May 18, 1987)

 Oldest Age While Imprisoned: 89 years old
 Country of Origin:  Jefferson County, Kentucky, USA
 Last or Current Prison:  Indiana State Penitentiary
 Time Served:  1908 – 1974 (66 years, 123 days)

photo source:  mikedashhistory.com

Johnson Van Dyke Grigsby, like a few of the others on this list, served one of the longest prisons sentences ever in the world (his record has been surpassed by Francis Clifford Smith, who is also on this list and still in jail). Grigsby spent over 66 years in jail after he was convicted of second degree murder in 1908. There are some conflicting stories over what exactly happened when Grigsby stabbed a man named James Brown to death in a saloon over a card game. Regardless of who instigated the fight that led to Brown’s death – Brown, who was white, reportedly hurled racial slurs at Grigsby, who is African American –  Grigsby got a life sentence.

In jail, Grigsby was a model prisoner and spent his time reading the Bible. Unfortunately, Grigsby spent a large part of his time in jail under psychiatric observation in a ward for the criminally insane despite never exhibiting signs of mental illness. After his release at age 89, Grigsby’s story was covered by the media and Johnny Cash even wrote a song about him called “Michigan City Howdy Do.”

8. Charles Fossard (c. 1882 – 1974)

 Oldest Age While Imprisoned: 92 years old
 Country of Origin:  France – immigrated to Australia where he committed his crime
 Last or Current Prison:  J Ward of Ararat Lunatic Asylum (now the Melbourne Polytechnic’s Ararat Training Centre )
 Time Served:  1903 – 1974 (70 years, 303 days




https://www.oldest.org/people/prisoners/