Nurses look after elderly prisoners on a new wing at Norwich

The Howard League for Penal Reform said older inmates had trebled in a decade and numbers were still growing.

Norwich Prison has responded to this growth by setting up a specialist wing with dedicated nursing staff.

Facilities are available at Norwich for 11 prisoners. The league says such facilities are rare.

Currently, three jails could be filled with older prisoners but the Prison Service has only a handful of male prisons with small wings offering specialist facilities.

In 1993 there were 450 sentenced prisoners aged 60 and over but by 2003 the number had increased to 1,441.

You have to think long and hard about what the point is of keeping the elderly in institutions designed for the young Professor David Wilson

Howard League director Frances Crook said: "Continuing to imprison older people at this rate raises the spectre of the Prison Service having to take over whole cemeteries.

"It is not a rational use of resources to use prison as a high security nursing home."

The charity said older prisoners often have special needs including infirmities, complex health problems, lack of mobility, incontinence and even terminal illnesses.

Prison exercise is usually gym-based with little access to outdoors, and even then warm clothing is not provided and there are no seats, it added.

Chairman of the charity's penal reform policy committee, Professor David Wilson, said: "No-one is pretending that these elderly prisoners have not caused harm.

"But you have to think long and hard about what the point is of keeping the elderly in institutions designed for the young and in circumstances that merely hasten their deaths."