Elderly Crime Wave

In what can only be described as the strangest phenomenon, Japan has found itself in the midst of an elderly crime wave. To me that is quite shocking. As people get older, most of them become more responsible, mature, and certainly too conservative in their values, to commit petty crimes for seemingly no reason. Oddly, in Japan, the proportion of crimes committed by people over the age of 65 has been steadily increasing for 20 years. The question is why?

Following his time in prison, 69-year-old Toshio Takata now lives in a halfway house in Hiroshima. He tells of his reasons for breaking the law, saying that he broke the law because he was poor. He needed somewhere to live free of charge. In desperation, he made the decision the commit a crime and sacrifice his freedom for the relative security of life behind bars. Takata says, “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.” That is such a sad solution, but it was the one he felt he could live with.
Takata says, “So, I took a bicycle and rode it to the police station and told the guy there: ‘Look, I took this.'”

His plan worked. This was Takata’s first offence…a crime committed when he was 62 years old, but Japanese courts treat petty theft seriously, so it was enough to get him a one-year sentence. Takata was a small, slender man, and with a nervous giggle. He looks nothing like a habitual criminal…how could he? He looks even less like someone who would threaten women with knives, but following his release from his first sentence, that’s exactly what he did. He needed another prison term. He says, “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 potential victim did.”

In all, Takata has spent half of the last eight years in jail. When asked if he likes being in prison, he points out the less obvious financial upside…his pension continues to be paid even while he’s in prison. He says, “It’s not that I like it, but I can stay there for free, and when I get out, I have saved some money. So, it is not that painful.” Sadly, Takata represents a sad new trend in Japanese crime. Normally a remarkably law-abiding society, a rapidly growing proportion of crime is now being carried about by its over-65-year-old members. In 1997, that age group accounted for about one in 20 convictions, but now, 20 years later that number has grown to more than one in five!! It is a sad statistic for sure, but one that clearly depicts the plight of this group of people in Japan.