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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: 3, Insightful) by urza9814 on Thursday January 31 2019, @08:28PM (1 child)
Even with a stable nuclear family the only way that works is if employers are paying enough that the elder's children can either hire a caretaker or one of them doesn't have to work and can sit at home taking care of the relatives.
Also, SCREW THAT! I don't want to be a caretaker just like I don't want to be a farmer. Some people do want to do those jobs. Let's pay them and let them do it. My adopted sister does work like that, she loves the job, but personally I'd much rather be writing code. And I really don't see why that's supposed to be some kind of crisis.
Much like having children...when there's ten thousand humans in the world and the species needs every survival chance it can get, then everyone having kids is a great thing. These days...certain people just shouldn't be reproducing. And even the good parents aren't always the best. Leave that stuff to the experts who can (and want to) dedicate their life to doing it as best they can instead of dumping that responsibility on ever single one of us overworked underpaid unintelligent peons out there.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 31 2019, @10:39PM
My mom's parents took care of just one of their four parents in old age - it forced them both into early retirement (about 5 years before plan), and was a terrible taxing experience for both of them for the seven years she was bedridden. The last several years they also had to bring in outside nursing help because they simply weren't up to the task. Both of them made (and executed) clear and effective plans to make sure they never visited that living hell on their children. Of course, it mostly worked because they had enough money in retirement, even with retiring early, to make it happen, and that was a result of the freak economy they lived in - born in the mid 1910s, he served in WWII, school teacher and night watchman in later life, passed away in the 1990s/2000s. I don't think any generation born after the 1950s could hope to achieve independent self sufficient retirement like they did with those kinds of jobs.
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