Prison: No place like home for the elderly & gaijin

[Taro Toporific]

Prisoners top 60,000 for 1st time in over 40 years
Mainichi Shimbun, Nov 5
The number of prisoners in Japan exceeded the 60,000 mark last year for the first time in 43 years, a Justice Ministry report showed Friday. ...
....The number of elderly and foreign prisoners has shown marked increases. At the end of 2003, 6,683 people aged 60 or over were serving prison terms, over 10 times the figure of three decades ago. Elderly people account for about 11 percent of all the inmates, as compared with 2 to 4 percent in the United States, Britain, Germany and France.
See also: Japan's jails under scrutiny ABC Online, Australia Nov 5

[Mulboyne]

Asahi: More inmates prefer solitary confinement
An increasing number of inmates are apparently breaking prison rules on purpose to land in solitary confinement because they can't handle relations with other inmates or they prefer to be left alone, prison officials say. Others simply want a break from their overcrowded prison cells, according to the officials...more...

[Mulboyne]

Reuters: Crime by elderly rises sharply in Japan
Crimes committed by elderly people in Japan have risen sharply in the past 15 years, a trend that has officials worried as the population ages rapidly due to longer lifespans and a falling birth rate. Police data shows that people aged 65 and older accounted for more than 10 percent of those arrested or taken into custody for crimes other than traffic violations in Japan in 2005, compared with just 2.2 percent in 1990, the Asahi newspaper said on Monday, citing National Police Agency data. Theft topped the list of crimes committed by the elderly in 2005, while 141 elderly people were arrested for murder -- more than three times the number in 1990...more...

Taken together with the media obsession about rising foreign crime, it is clearly time for the police to put the likes of Henry Scott-Stokes, Donald Keene and Donald Richie under close observation.

[Charles]

Taken together with the media obsession about rising foreign crime, it is clearly time for the police to put the likes of Henry Scott-Stokes, Donald Keene and Donald Richie under close observation.

What makes you think they aren't already under close observation?

[maninjapan]

Section them all - or keep them passice with one and a hlaf cupe sake. Whenever I see and old person on the train with a one cup - 90% of the time they are fast asleep.

[dimwit]

My wife has experience of these at the gym. One old bat is in the habit of stealing shoes -male, female, any size. Usually the next day the daughter returns the stolen shoes. As far as I know nobody has tried to ban her from the gym. A worse case happened about 2 weeks ago. One senile oldy shit her pants and then put the shit in a locker, befouling the place for days.

I suspect a lot of the crimes are being committed by people who should normally be institutionalized but for lack of money or misplaced symathy are not.

[Mike Oxlong]

There seems to be a real stigma attached to and therefore aversion to psychiatry and any kind of assistance for those with mental health problems. Has Tom Cruise been spreading the love?!

[Buraku]

it ain't looking good

[Mulboyne]

Independent: Japan's pensioners embark on 'grey crime' wave

...The incident last week is part of a wave of so-called grey crime in Japan. The percentage of over-65s in prison has trebled in the past decade and exceeds 10 per cent of the total prison population - four times the UK figure. Japan has the highest rate of incarceration for pensioners in the industrialised world...The Japanese Justice Ministry is so alarmed by the rise in geriatric crime that it has started a research project into its causes. Police departments have devised questionnaires for elderly prisoners in an attempt to find out what makes them tick. Among the factors they are exploring are fear of the future, poverty and loneliness. "We have no idea what is causing the rise in the elderly crime rate," said Yoshihiro Ono, a ministry of justice researcher...more...

[Mulboyne]

Mainichi: Veteran villains on the rise

More than 22,000 elderly people -- those who are 65 years old or older -- were apprehended for crimes committed over the first six months of 2006, a 9 percent increase from the same period last year, police said. The National Police Agency's (NPA) records show that 22,577 people were found to have committed crimes from January to June, about 12.5 percent of all criminals apprehended in the period...more...

[Mulboyne]

Yomiuri: Jails unable to meet rise in inmates

The building of new prisons and detention houses and the expansion of existing ones has failed to keep up with the increasing number of detainees, which now exceeds 70,000 due to toughened penalties. The figure is the highest since the period of confusion after World War II from 1948 to 1951...The existing prison and detention houses are meant to hold a combined total of only 60,794, but they are operating at 116.4 percent capacity...In particular, the number of foreign inmates increased rapidly, nearly quadrupling from 1,424 in 1993 to 5,177 in 2005, accounting for about 8 percent of the total...more...

[Taro Toporific]

[Ketou]

So the only real safety net available to the aged without any money is prison........sad.

[Mulboyne]

Asahi: New blocks to be constructed for elderly prisoners

To meet the demands of an increasingly aging population, the government will implement measures to make life more comfortable for senior citizens--in prison. Justice Ministry officials said separate prison blocks would be constructed at three prisons specifically for elderly prisoners who are immobile or have difficulty getting around. "By bringing the elderly together in one place, we can improve the efficiency of overall prison management by setting up work and prison life schedules that match their pace," said a ministry official. The new facilities are designed to not only make prison life easier for elderly inmates, but to also ease the burden on prison guards and employees who work with the older prisoners and often must devote more attention to them than other inmates. The Justice Ministry is planning to request a total of 8.3 billion yen in construction fees in the supplementary budget for fiscal 2007. Special blocks for prison seniors will be built at prisons in Hiroshima, Takamatsu and Oita. A total of about 1,000 elderly prisoners will be moved to those three prison blocks. All three facilities were built in the 1960s and 1970s. Construction of the special elderly blocks will be done in tandem with a general refurbishment of the prisons...more...

[dimwit]

I've taught the police and they have told me about a number of cases where poor elderly ex-criminals will openly commit trival crimes so that they can get arrested and sent back to jail and given that most of them have extensive criminal records they can expect longer jail sentences.

[American Oyaji]

Yeah. Happens in Japan and the U.S.

[Mulboyne]

UPI: More elderly Japanese turn to crime

The number of elderly Japanese convicted of crimes ranging from petty theft to homicide more than tripled between 1998 and 2008. Tomomi Fujiwara, author of "Bousou Roji: or "The Elderly Out of Control," blames fundamental changes in Japanese society. "In the past, elderly people were revered and cared for in Japanese society, living in the same homes with their children and families," he told The Daily Telegraph. "That has gone now and they don't recognize their own neighborhood or the people living around them." In 1998, 13,739 people 65 or older were convicted of crimes in Japan. In 2008, there were 48,597 convicted senior citizens, accounting for one in seven of all crimes and 150 homicide cases. Some of the more notorious elderly criminals include a 79-year-old woman who left a homeless shelter in Tokyo and attacked two young women with a knife, an 85-year-old man with a terminal illness who strangled his wife so she would not survive him and a man who used a knife to rob a store in Nagoya. The government plans to spend 8.3 billion yen ($82 million) on new prison facilities designed for the frail elderly.

[Taro Toporific]

I would choose Japanese prison compared to understaffed, crappy, nursing homes too.

Seniors now make up record 10.4% of new inmates in Japan
The Japan Times | Nov. 13, 2015
The proportion of new inmates in Japan who were at least 65 years of age topped 10 percent for the first time on record in 2014, according to a white paper on crime released Friday by the Justice Ministry.
Of the 21,866 people sent to Japan’s prisons last year, 2,283 of them, or 10.4 percent, were senior citizens...more...

smoking.jpg

[matsuki]

I would choose Japanese prison compared to understaffed, crappy, nursing homes too.

Seniors now make up record 10.4% of new inmates in Japan
The Japan Times | Nov. 13, 2015
The proportion of new inmates in Japan who were at least 65 years of age topped 10 percent for the first time on record in 2014, according to a white paper on crime released Friday by the Justice Ministry.
Of the 21,866 people sent to Japan’s prisons last year, 2,283 of them, or 10.4 percent, were senior citizens...more...

smoking.jpg

I wonder if the food is better?

During my experience in detention, there was some dude in there that was nicknamed "yoda" that could hardly talk, let alone make it to the toilet. Besides randomly getting naked a few times in his cell (much to his cohabitants dismay) nobody could figure out what the hell someone that old and mental could have possibly been arrested for.