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Jail is not top of most people's bucket list of places to visit, but for some it is becoming increasingly attractive. I had heard anecdotal stories of homeless in the UK committing petty crimes in the hope of being given a warm bed and a meal, but in Japan it seems that the elderly are taking things to a whole new level:
Japan is in the grip of an elderly crime wave - the proportion of crimes committed by people over the age of 65 has been steadily increasing for 20 years. The BBC's Ed Butler asks why.
At a halfway house in Hiroshima - for criminals who are being released from jail back into the community - 69-year-old Toshio Takata tells me he broke the law because he was poor. He wanted somewhere to live free of charge, even if it was behind bars.
"I reached pension age and then I ran out of money. So it occurred to me - perhaps I could live for free if I lived in jail," he says.
"So I took a bicycle and rode it to the police station and told the guy there: 'Look, I took this.'"
The plan worked. This was Toshio's first offence, committed when he was 62, but Japanese courts treat petty theft seriously, so it was enough to get him a one-year sentence.
Small, slender, and with a tendency to giggle, Toshio looks nothing like a habitual criminal, much less someone who'd threaten women with knives. But after he was released from his first sentence, that's exactly what he did.
"I went to a park and just threatened them. I wasn't intending to do any harm. I just showed the knife to them hoping one of them would call the police. One did."
Altogether, Toshio has spent half of the last eight years in jail.
I ask him if he likes being in prison, and he points out an additional financial upside - his pension continues to be paid even while he's inside.
"It's not that I like it but I can stay there for free," he says. "And when I get out I have saved some money. So it is not that painful."
Toshio represents a striking trend in Japanese crime. In a remarkably law-abiding society, a rapidly growing proportion of crimes is carried about by over-65s. In 1997 this age group accounted for about one in 20 convictions but 20 years later the figure had grown to more than one in five - a rate that far outstrips the growth of the over-65s as a proportion of the population (though they now make up more than a quarter of the total).
To my mind, there is something wrong with the way we take care of the elderly or those who are significantly poorer than the average when their most attractive option is jail.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by urza9814 on Thursday January 31 2019, @08:26PM (5 children)
Like in the US, where native-born non-criminal citizens are locked up in prison and told they have to work, paid $1 per day, until they earn enough money to purchase evidence of their innocence from their own government?
(see page 20: https://www.amnestyusa.org/pdfs/JailedWithoutJustice.pdf) [amnestyusa.org]
As far as I'm concerned, there is one and only one acceptable purpose for prison -- separating dangerous individuals from society so they cannot cause further harm. That's it. While they're in there, you should be doing everything feasible to rehabilitate them so that they can be released as soon as possible. Anything else is a waste of everyone's time and money on bullshit illogical desires for blood and revenge.
Under such a system, these people probably wouldn't be locked up because they're clearly not dangerous. But then someone would have to think for more than half a second to come up with an actual solution to the problem...so that's unlikely to happen any time soon...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 31 2019, @11:33PM (4 children)
We know a Harvard PhD psychologist who worked for some years in community based drug rehab programs - alternatives to incarceration. Her subjects' recidivism rate was less than 1/3 that of the subjects who went to prison instead, but the county only funded her to the minimum required by some federal program that supplied surplus funds to the county justice department in exchange for running the program.
All the data pointed to long term benefits to the community, lower prison costs, lower drug related crimes, etc. if they would expand the program, but they never even considered expanding it, and often were running afoul of the minimum enrollment requirements.
In that part of the South, at least, Judges want punishment, not a promise of a better future. Punishment they understand, punishment they can control, all this namby-pamby Harvard PhD scientist data crap is a bunch of hooey. Besides, as old as most of the judges around there are, they are locking up the criminals until after the Judges are likely to die of old age.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday February 01 2019, @02:12AM (3 children)
I think what judges really understand, are the contracts they signed to keep a for-profit prison filled to near capacity.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 01 2019, @03:30AM (2 children)
I think it's more insidious than that. They seem to want people who might fall prey to traps like drugs and crime to go ahead and fall, to get them into prison and out of society rather than trying to help them not fall prey in the first place. Sure, for profit prisons are a huge structural machine that wants to be fed, but the judges and many who enter law enforcement around those parts want that machine to grow and suck up all of "those people," even when some of "those people" are friends or family.
The whole "do as I say, not as I do" hypocritical double standard - the privilege of wealth to screw up and not pay the price of incarceration, but instead pay the price of a donation to the city councilmen... above all else, the maintenance of the status quo, and a "return to the good old days" MAGA - that one seems to resonate with the crowd.
Newsflash, folks - the good old days sucked even worse than the present; the people it sucked the worst for died and mostly didn't get to relate their stories about how bad it was for them. Go back to that way of doing things, and you just might find yourselves or your children on the unpleasant side of your chosen reality.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday February 01 2019, @02:12PM (1 child)
It's two sides of the same coin as they say...
Judges *have* been caught literally selling children to prisons (ie, the "kids for cash scandal": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal)...this [wikipedia.org] increases their own personal power by giving them more wealth. At the same time, *anybody* they send to prison increases their own personal power slightly by creating a larger lower class beneath them.
They want the slaves and plantations back, and prison is the socially acceptable way to do that in the modern era...prisoners are cheap labor for the government (and sold cheaply to private corporations), and cheaper goods for everyone...and the kickbacks let them take better advantage of that.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 01 2019, @02:19PM
The hick town I lived in from 2006 to 2013 has judges, police, commissioners, and school board officials who are the children and grandchildren of publicly outed KKK leaders from the early 1900s, when the KKK more or less ran the town openly hostile to catholics, jews, blacks, hispanics, asians, you name it.
In 2008 young punks in that town would go around at night with red paint graffiti-ing homes of asians with racial slurs, probably others too - I just personally worked with a Chinese man who had his house vandalized by them while they were sleeping inside.
🌻🌻 [google.com]