To counter poverty and loneliness, elderly Japanese people prefer… to go to prison: “Some are taken voluntarily”

A violent inmate with eight different identities “crashes” an Arlon prison guard and gets an additional 10 months

Incomparable conditions with the outdoors

And for good reason, within the prison walls, the inmates are fed, housed, washed and cared for… and above all benefit from the company they lacked so much outside. One of them, Yoko, imprisoned five times in 25 years for drug trafficking, says she notices the aging of the prison population with each new return to detention. According to his testimony, some people would even “doing bad things on purpose and getting caught so they can go back to prison if they run out of money“.

Two years suspended prison sentence for letting children starve to death in La Louvière

Theft, the most committed crime

This is particularly the case of Akiyo, a sixty-year-old who is currently serving her second stay in detention. “If I had been financially stable and had a comfortable lifestyle, I definitely wouldn’t have done it“, she admits about the theft of food of which she was found guilty. This type of crime is also the crime most committed by the elderly in Japan, and mainly concerns women. Thus, “in 2022, more than 80% of the country’s elderly female prisoners were in prison for theft“, says CNN based on government data.