Marvin Young has a slight country drawl, clear blue eyes and polite way about him. His hair used to be reddish-brown, but now it's mostly white, and he still wears the now-tarnished silver wedding ring given to him by his wife of 53 years.
He survived the Depression, served his country in World War II and raised three children. He's blind in one eye, partially deaf and plagued with a plethora of health problems.At first glance, dangerous is probably the last word one would use to describe Young.
But a danger to society is what a judge said he is.
So instead of spending the sunset of his life with his wife, Thelma, Young will pass the time in one of the state's medium-security prisons.
At 79 years and 10 months, Young is the oldest inmate living inside the state's prisons. He is a member of a growing population of elderly inmates whose advanced age brings health problems that the prison rarely had to deal with in the past.
Right now 185 prisoners are 55 years or older.
That number will undoubtedly go up, not necessarily because the elderly are getting more violent or more deviant, but because more and more inmates are spending longer periods behind bars.
In fact, of 191 people convicted of murder in Utah, 20 have been given "natural life" sentences by the Board of Pardons and Parole. That means, even though a court or jury said the person is eligible for early release, the board, which controls when inmates get out of prison, has said the inmate will never be paroled.
Life sentences for killers in Utah are more than twice as long as the national average, according to Department of Justice statistics. Parole or rehearing dates in Utah are often decades away - especially for those convicted of murder.
Two people share the honor of being the longest continuous residents of the Utah State Prison: Myron Lance and Walter Kelbach, two of the state's most notorious and deadliest inmates.
They were sentenced to die in 1967 for killing two men during a five-day crime spree that left six people dead the week before Christmas 1966. But in 1972 the U.S. Supreme Court declared capital punishment unconstitutional, and their death sentences were commuted to life in prison with the possibility of parole in 1977.
The board decided at their last hearing in 1992 Lance and Kelbach would spend their lives in prison.
At least one of the men said the board's decision isn't justice.
"I'm not crying about it," Kelbach said. "I know most people don't care."
Kelbach feels abused by the system because he wasn't re-sentenced until 10 years after a jury said he should die. For 30 years this month, he's lived in prison, but he said he hasn't made a life for himself.
"The way things in here change all the time, nobody could make a life for themselves here," he said. "I take it one day at a time. I don't plan on having a life. . . . You can't even get catalogs to send someone a Christmas present."
Kelbach works in the prison's print shop and is thought of by other inmates as a great jailhouse lawyer.
He says he misses most the ability to go where he wants, when he wants. He feels a little angry about the way the system has treated him, but he doesn't think about the past - including his crimes - much at all.
"I don't reflect too much," he said. "I haven't changed now as far as my thinking about the past. If I was to even consider feeling sorry for what I've done, the state's taken that out of me with the time (it has) made me do. . . . I feel the state's robbed me."
He has health problems like Young, some of which he said are related to the prison's ban placed on smoking four years ago.
Young, who was convicted of forcible sexual abuse, a third-degree felony, wonders why he couldn't have been sentenced to home confinement. The maximum he can spend in prison is five years, but that may be a life sentence for a 79-year-old.
He said he would have worn an electronic monitoring device, and that would have enabled him to help care for his wife, who also suffers from a number of health problems.
Both men complain, like most inmates, about the uncertainty of the length of their sentences. Utah has what is called an indeterminate sentencing structure, which means inmates go to prison for a range of years and the Board of Pardons, not a judge, decides how long they'll actually be behind bars.
That's exactly what corrections director Pete Haun likes about Utah's system. He said allowing the board to decide when an inmate gets released forces a person to take more responsibility for his or her crimes.
"Because if they don't follow through with accepting responsibility and changing their behavior . . . then they're kept in a custodial situation longer," Haun said.
And while their outward appearance may be non-threatening, a look at what elderly inmates have done to get to prison gives a different impression.
"I was amazed to see the kind of offenses they'd committed and at the ages they'd committed them," he said. The majority of older inmates are in prison because of sex offenses.
In fact, he said, when officials looked at whom they could release early to relieve crowding a few months ago, very few of the elderly inmates were eligible for reconsideration.
He knows that means more and more inmates will grow old, and often feeble, in prison.
"We need to look at the special needs of certain kinds of offenders," he said. "That's something we're (talking) about now."
One of the things officials are considering is a geriatric section. That's a concept many inmates support. One inmate who asked not to be identified said elderly inmates are easy prey for young prisoners.
Young and Kelbach said the state needs to look at cheaper and more humane options for older inmates, like electronic monitoring.
"I don't believe you have to lock someone away," Kelbach said. "No matter who they are. . . . They have methods to keep track of people and change their behavior on the outside without destroying everything."
After all, he said, a person who's missing from society is declared dead after seven years. Three decades, for any crime, is too long, he said.
Almost 60, Kelbach said he'd rather have died for his crimes than lived his entire adult life in prison.
"I think the death penalty is more humane than doing natural life in prison," he said. "I believe it's part of the conspiracy against us. The state is going to keep us until we're dead, and that's still a state execution."