HAMILTON, Ala. -- Grant Cooper knows he lives in prison, but there are days when he cannot remember why. His crimes flit in and out of his memory like flies through a hole in a screen door, so that sometimes his mind and conscience are blank and clean.

He used to be a drinker and a drifter who had no control over his rage. In 1978, in an argument with a man in a bread line at the Forgotten Man Ministry in Birmingham, Ala., his hand automatically slid into his pants pocket for a knife.

He cut the man so quick and deep that he died before his body slipped to the floor. Mr. Cooper had killed before, in 1936 and in 1954, so the judge gave him life. Back then, before he needed help to go to the bathroom, Mr. Cooper was a dangerous man.

Now he is 77, and since his stroke in 1993 he mostly just lies in his narrow bunk at the Hamilton Prison for the Aged and Infirm, a blue blanket hiding the tubes that run out of his bony body. Sometimes the other inmates put him in a wheelchair and park him in the sun.

"I'm lost," he mumbled. "I'm just lost."

He is a relic of his violent past, but Mr. Cooper, and the special prison that holds him, may represent the future of corrections in a time when judges and other politicians are offering longer, "true-time" sentences, like life without parole, as a way to protect the public from crime.

This small 200-bed prison in the pine-shrouded hills of northwestern Alabama near the Mississippi line is one of only a few in the nation specializing in aged and disabled inmates, but that is expected to change as prison populations turn gradually gray.

While the proportion of older prisoners has risen only slightly in recent years, their numbers have jumped substantially. In 1989, the nation's prisons held 30,500 inmates 50 or older; by 1993, that number had risen to almost 50,500, according to the American Civil Liberties Union's National Prison Project.

But experts say the major increases are still to come. "Three-strikes" sentencing for habitual offenders and new laws that require inmates to serve all or most of their sentences, instead of just a fraction, will mean "an aging phenomenon" in American prisons, said James Austin, the executive vice president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency in San Francisco.

"There are going to be huge geriatric wards," said Jenni Gainsborough, a lawyer with the National Prison Project.

The older inmates will fill beds needed for younger criminals who are more of a threat, said Burl Cain, warden at the Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana, the nation's largest maximum-security prison. "We need our prison beds for the predators who are murdering people today," he said.

Locked away for good, inmates will need special medical care and will have to be housed inside separate cellblocks, or separate prisons like Hamilton, to protect them from younger, stronger predators, said W. C. Berry, the warden at Hamilton.

"What else can we do with them?" he said.

Once Dangerous Now Helpless

One Hamilton inmate, Thomas Gurley, has Huntington's disease. He sits in a chair all day and shakes and stares. He was a kidnapper, but now he has trouble holding a spoon.

It may seem cruel to lock a man away and watch him slowly die, Mr. Berry said, but most of the men in his care could not survive in the general population. Some are missing legs, some have misplaced their minds, some are just too old. They have heart, kidney or liver failure and need machines to keep them alive.

Some victims' rights groups see the slow death of these men as poetic justice and say they should take their chances in the general population, to see what it is like to live in fear.

But Mr. Berry, who built a reputation as a no-nonsense police detective before coming here, has seen what men do to each other in prison. Inmates who are getting old write him letters and beg to transfer to his prison, which has been in operation since Federal lawsuits in the 1970's obliged the state to separate its weaker inmates.

"They sort of look out for each other here," he said. The inmates who can work strip beds and help clean up after the old, most helpless ones. When Mr. Gurley slips from his chair to the floor, other inmates lift him back in.

There are prison breaks, but the escapees do not usually get far. Two inmates, one blind, one mostly blind and unable to breathe on his own, made it as far as the town hospital. It is across the street.

"We had another one get out, and we found him at the end of the runway of the local airport," Warden Berry said. "He couldn't breathe that well. I told him that if he hadn't had to stop every fourth landing light to take a breath, he might have made it."

Mr. Cooper travels only in his mind. "I don't know if they'll ever set me free," he said, looking up from his bed, a pair of black-framed glasses sitting crooked on his face. "I don't know. I don't reckon so."

Some days, if he forgets enough, he already is.

Life at the End Of the Whisky River

All Jessie Hatcher's life, the devil in him would come swimming out every time a drink of whisky trickled in.

"It was 1979, down in Pike County," he said, looking down some dusty road in his memory for the life he took. "Me and this boy was drinking. He thought I had some money, but I didn't have none. We took to fighting, and I killed him. Quinn. His name was Quinn. Killed him with a .32. I was bad to drink back then. I never drunk another drop."

Like Grant Cooper, he has a life history of violence. He shot a woman several times with a .22 rifle in 1978, but she lived and he served less than a year. He was drunk then. The murder of the man in Pike County sent him away for life.

He is 76 now and limps on a cane because of a broken leg that never healed right. He works all day in the flower garden, where he has raked the dirt so smooth you can roll marbles on it.

"My favorites are the saucer sunflowers," he said, "because they're so beautiful."

The young man, the one whose life was washed away on a river of whisky, seems to have vanished inside this wizened little man on his knees in the mud, plucking weeds and humming spirituals.

"They could take the fences down and I wouldn't run," he said. "This is the right place for me.

"Lock me down in one of them other prisons, and I'd drop like a top," he said, referring to the practice in general prisons of locking aged or infirm inmates in cells to protect them.

How to Best Use Precious Cell Space?

The State of Alabama, often criticized for taking prison reform in the wrong direction with its return to leg irons and breaking rocks, is part of a more progressive trend with Hamilton, said Ms. Gainsborough of the civil liberties union.

But while the prison is hailed as a humane answer, the practice of keeping old inmates until death is wasting crucial space, said Mr. Cain, the Angola warden.

"There comes a time when a man goes through what we call criminal menopause and he is unable to do the crime that he is here for," Mr. Cain said. "My prison is becoming an old folks' home."

He sees nothing wrong with letting an old killer die free after prison has taken most of his life from him. As politicians shout for life sentences, he watches helplessly as Angola, with 3,000 inmates doing life, fills beyond capacity.

"When the criminal is not able to commit that crime again, it's time to put someone in there who is killing now," said Mr. Cain, who keeps older inmates in a special ward. "As Jesus Christ said, 'Let the dead bury the dead.' We don't have room."

For some inmates at Hamilton, keeping them locked away for life is the only alternative. Jason Riley, 41, has been partially blind since a car hit him when he was 3. He killed two women by stabbing and strangling them, then cut his own arms to watch himself bleed. He has said he would kill again.

"I'll probably die here," said Mr. Riley, who carries a magnifying glass in his pocket to see with. One of his gray eyes looms huge behind it as he gazes at you. "I accept that, accepted it several years ago. Life would be easier for some of the other inmates if they would accept it, too."

The Repercussions Of a Political Trend

Sentences, especially life sentences, used to be like rubber bands. They stretched or snapped short depending on the inmate's record in prison, crowding and, sometimes, whether the inmate could convince the parole board that he had found the Lord. Inmates like the 76-year-old Mr. Hatcher could usually walk after 20 years, even with a murder conviction. But that was before it became so popular for politicians to run on pro-death-penalty, throw-away-the-key platforms.

"I'd like to be free," Mr. Hatcher said, "for a little while."

He has a feeling he will be, he said, and winks, as if some higher power has whispered in his ear that this will happen.

Warden Berry, standing beside him, looks away. It is common for a man doing life without parole to have that feeling, even though he knows chances are he will leave on a hospital gurney, or with a blanket over his head.

"They think, 'I just want a few years at the end of my life, free,' " he said. "You'll see them, men in their 70's, suddenly start walking around out in the prison yard, trying to take care of themselves, to save themselves for it.

"And some we have who wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, because the thought of going out terrifies them."

They know that they have lived so long inside, everything they knew or loved outside will be gone, he said. So when they walk out the door, they will be completely alone.

The Birmingham jail was full of martyrs and heroes in the 1960's. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made history locked behind its walls.

William (Tex) Johnson, who snatched $24 from a man's hand and got caught, was in fancy company. But as the civil rights heroes rejoined their struggle, a white judge gave him 50 years.

He escaped three times. "You can't give no 21-year-old boy 50 years; I had to run," he said. While he was out, he committed 38 more crimes. Now he is at Hamilton, finishing his sentence. He will be released in 1998, but two strokes have left him mostly dead on one side. "I believe I can make it," he said. "I believe I can."

There will be nothing on the outside for him. Warden Berry said that when an inmate reached a certain point, it might be more humane to keep him in prison. Wives die, children stop coming to see him.

"We bury most of them ourselves," on state land, he said. The undertaking and embalming class at nearby Jefferson State University prepares the bodies for burial for free, for the experience.

"They make 'em up real nice," the warden said.