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posted by martyb on Thursday January 31 2019, @06:20PM   Printer-friendly
from the three-hots-and-a-cot dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday February 01 2019, @12:43AM (1 child)

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Friday February 01 2019, @12:43AM (#794806) Homepage Journal

    ... who did not know how to sleep on the street. Consider that there's been a blind man, who when he wins the lottery about one of out three nights, sleeps at The Portland Rescue Mission.

    Some homeless people flatly refuse housing or even shelter. "Jesus did it, I can too!", "I CAN'T SLEEP INDOORS!"

    Some homeless people when actually placed in housing return to the streets. One such was a woman who slept on a certain LA bus stop bench for decades. She _often_ got housing, then right back to her bench.

    Putting them all aside: consider Utah's discovery, now supported by some other US States like Washington that it is tens of thousands of dollars cheaper to house _everybody_ then to provide services to the homeless or to keep them in jail.

    Consider also that forty percent of US jail inmates are mentally ill; most US jails therefore _also_ contain $$$ mental hospitals with psychiatrists and everything.

    Now, how many US residents get one million or more from capital gains? If I can't just turn that up in a few searches, I'll research it more diligently, write up an article for my site then post its link in a reply...

    ... and there is so much _other_ info about Capital Gains online that I'm unable to found how how many people pay how much.

    However, some of my very best friends are ardent leftists; Jimmy Carter reads Dave's Blog [seeingtheforest.com].

    I'll ask Dave then link my article in a reply, likely this weekend.

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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 01 2019, @03:04AM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday February 01 2019, @03:04AM (#794856)

    it is tens of thousands of dollars cheaper to house _everybody_ then to provide services to the homeless or to keep them in jail.

    This is true of so many neglected social programs - see the successful social programs in other countries for some solid evidence to back up the studies...

    If I were homeless, I think I would prefer the "predictability" of always being able to sleep on the street as compared to the insult of waiting for hours in a line for the chance of maybe getting an inside room for a night or two. If I could get _reliable_ housing that was better than being on the street (and some house-mates I've had in the past could drive one to prefer sleeping outside), I do think I would prefer that, particularly if I didn't have to waste my life waiting to talk to a social worker to secure it.

    I've been unemployed a few times, and one of the lasting impressions from that experience is having to show up and interview with the social worker to keep the unemployment benefits flowing while looking for actual work. On the one hand, it's a ridiculous waste of time... on the other, the 3-4 hours required to jump that hoop unleashes thousands of dollars in benefits before the next waste of time interview is required, so, with the right attitude/perspective, that's better hourly pay than anything I've made working "real jobs."

    Still, at what point is interviewing with social workers too costly as compared to the benefit of free housing? A couple of hours every couple of months would seem to be a no brainer, worth it... but several hours of queueing for a chance of a single night's sleep indoors? - hell no, that's no way to live.

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