Seniors with dementia have become a growing problem in the criminal justice system. The Washington Post examines the struggle between recognizing that seniors with dementia and other brain disease need treatment, not prison, and the need of society to be protected from those who cause harm.

People with Alzheimer's disease and other forms of mental deterioration are increasingly getting entangled with law enforcement. That has police, prosecutors, judges, psychiatric workers and caregivers struggling to balance the humane treatment of a vulnerable but volatile segment of the populace against the need to protect the public.

"It's a problem, and a problem that's only going to grow," said Max B. Rothman, executive director of the Center on Aging at Florida International University in Miami. "As the baby boomers age, it's going to become an even bigger problem."

Echoing a long-running debate over the mentally ill and disabled, the matter also is raising thorny issues about how to determine when people in the throes of slow mental decline are no longer culpable for their actions.

...."When they get into the legal system, the system often doesn't know how to handle it," said Donna Cohen, a professor in the Department of Aging and Mental Health at the University of South Florida. "Yes, older people with dementia may do something that's hurtful. But throwing them into a cell . . . is not the way to handle it. It's inhumane."

This is a sad article to read, but please do, because it is an issue we will be hearing far more about as the aging population expands.