Boomers Are Becoming Criminals, And No One's Talking About It

I don't know if you guys have noticed but people are getting really really old lately life expectancy has been going steadily up for like decades for centuries now really all of these old people are not necessarily living the the lives that they thought that they would live at this point we currently have a record number of over 50s in the UK that are working we have a situation where around 1 in four us adults over 50 says that they're never going to retire but I want us to focus on a different place today Japan Japan

is an incredibly interesting case study when you think of this phenomenon of elderly poverty and how this is driving a wave of crime amongst the elderly as well there are a significant number of elderly people who are getting arrested and put in prison on purpose in order to avoid this combo of being broke and alone in old age it's like a really interesting case study even if you're not from there because they actually have a lot of problems that are worldwide problems but just dialed up to 11 Japan currently has the oldest population in the

world by percentage almost % of the population is over the age of 65 and something like 1 in 10 are over the age of 80 if you're in a wealthier country the Aging population is almost certainly a problem similarly they have an insane level of government debt Japan's debt to GDP ratio is the second highest in the world just behind Sudan and I don't know how much you know about Sudan but they're currently in the middle of a civil war so they've kind of got a good reason to be down bad most countries are running

just incredibly high levels of national debt and it's eventually going to become a problem for a lot of places but because it's not a problem now we kind of ignore it I don't know about you but when I when I was younger I had this idea of Japan as being like in the future I think I just watched too much anime and I had this idea that Japan was just living on another level to everywhere else in a sense I was right that Japan is living in the future they're just living in the worst possible

timeline of the future despite the fact that their prison population has actually steadily been shrinking the percentage of elderly inmates has actually been rising the people who are left in ja are older and older and older the crime rate amongst the elderly has actually quadrupled in the last few decades this isn't just a Japanese problem though and in America you can see that people who were 55 or older made up around 3% of the US prison population in 1991 but 30 years later in 2021 they accounted for 15% that's a 500% increase right in the

elderly prison population and it's resulting in this phenomenon where prisons are turning into de facto nursing homes having to fulfill a societal need that isn't being fulfilled by the social care system some prisoners are now actually expected as part of their work duties to act as care workers and to take care of other prisoners who are elderly and unable to take care of themselves Japan is the canary in the coal mine a really good preview of what might happen in a lot of different countries over the world what makes this uh even more interesting is

that Japan's criminal system has uh 99% % conviction rate and you would think that this would act as a severe deterrent especially in the elderly who typically commit fewer crimes than the rest of the population crime is one of those things that people usually age out of but if we look at the the specific crimes that the elderly are committing you'll notice that shoplifting is an extremely an extremely common crime for the elderly and it seems to be the crime that they choose to commit the most if you commit shoplifting you're basically guaranteed to to

go to prison and if that's what you're looking for if you're looking for a refuge then you can find it bloom wrote a piece on this phenomenon of the elderly getting arrested on purpose and they interviewed a number of elderly women who chosen to check in to to prisons and this is what they had to say so these are a few of the people that were interviewed Mrs a who stole some clothing and was sentenced to 2 years and 3 months in jail Mrs T aged 80 who stole codu some fish in a frying pan

and was sentenced to 2 and a half years and Mrs N who stole a paperback some crocketts and a hand fan and was sentenced to 3 years and 2 months in jail granted some of these people were like repeat offenders but this definitely still looks like a a disproportionate punishment for these crimes right this first testimonial is from Mrs K aged 74 years old she stole Coca-Cola and orange juice this was her third term in prison the sentence wasn't wasn't disclosed and she has a son and a daughter this is what she says about her

choice to to be in prison I was living on welfare it was hard when I'm released I will manage to live with with ,000 Yen $9 a day I don't have anything to look forward to outside this is a pretty on the- noose testimonial about the experience of going to jail and why this woman at age 74 has decided to deliberately check into a prison effectively I want to read a longer one next when I was young I didn't think about stealing all I thought about was working hard I worked at a rubber Factory for

20 years and then as a care worker at a hospital money was always tight but we still got to send our son to college my husband had a stroke 6 years ago and has been bedridden ever since he also has dementia and suffers from delusions and paranoia it was a lot to take care of him physically and emotionally because of my old age but I couldn't talk about my stress with anyone because I was ashamed I was imprisoned for the first time when I was 70 when I shoplifted I had money in my wallet then

I thought about my life I didn't want to go home and I had nowhere else to go asking for help in prison was the only way my life is much easier in prison I can be myself and breathe however temporarily my son tells me I'm Ill and should be hospitalized in a mental institution and take it easy but I don't think I'm Ill I think my anxiety drove me to steal this one is a particularly like heartbreaking testimonial because it shows that this problem isn't purely being driven by Financial incentives clearly this is a person

that lacked a social support network and the appropriate amount of support that they would need to be able to live out their last few years of life in uh to a decent standard that's kind of reinforced by this third testimonial by Mrs N she's the one who stole uh paperback Crickett and a hand fan she also had a husband two sons and six grandchildren and she simply says that I enjoy my life in prison more there were always people around and I don't feel lonely here when I got out the second time I promised that

I wouldn't go back but when I was out I couldn't help feeling nostalgic clearly this crime wave is not just driven by money it's also driven by a huge social component the fact that she's clearly lacking a lot of what she needs in terms of community outside of jail and that the prison system is not providing an easy way to transition outside of jail and so people are just going through this revolving door even in their 70s they have to go back particularly elderly women who are extremely likely to live in poverty nearly half of

elderly women who are 65 or older who live alone are in poverty and 29% for senior men and it can be easy to think of Boomers as being the ones who took everything from us but poverty amongst old age is a huge problem and it's clearly a huge driving factor for the people who choose to make this decision one thing that did surprise me is that a lot of these elderly people who choose to go to prison have families in fact everyone who Bloomberg interviewed actually has family whether it's a daughter or a son or

a husband and yet were were lacking a broader sense of community or felt that their family didn't necessarily provide the attention and care that they needed Japan is a relatively collectivist culture and there are more social expectations to gather as families but this is being eroded even even there despite the fact that I said this is the Japanese problem it's also a problem in a number of other countries in the US the problem manifests more amongst people who are homeless who choose to go to jail and choose to keep reoffending in order to avoid the

elements avoid the cold of the winter avoid danger and risk on the streets those who are even more desperate there's a subsection of of the population who has reached that like threshold point of desperation where going to to prison is actually an upgrade to staying out on the streets it just happens that Japan given that there's so much further ahead with these problems has expanded the group of desperate people to relatively normal pensioners this is actually changing the the structure of what prisons are actually doing in society Japan tests for dementia when you get admitted

to prison it's exposing this huge gap in the social care system when I first thought about this problem I asked myself how much does it cost to actually keep a person in prison and it turns out that it costs 3.2 million yen in Japan to keep someone locked up for a year according to the Justice Ministry it's about double what a person on standard welfare can get which to me is baffling and you have to ask yourself if they just gave the person that money like straight up would they still have committed those crimes it

surprises me so much that a country is willing to spend this much money to keep someone locked up like an elderly shoplifter rather than strengthening the Social Security net in order for these people to not need to commit these crimes the structure of crime itself has now changed to such a degree that elderly criminals are now more likely to reoffend than younger prisoners and the Japanese government is is trying to do something about this um they are launching initiatives between the Justice sector and the welfare sector and giving elderly people special treatment but all of

these measures are at the entry point and at the exit point of the prison system while the in prison people aren't being set up to succeed and they're simply getting a little bit of support at the start and end then it's not really a surprise that they choose to reoffend and they choose to return to the the place of comfort that they've they've learned I I I genuinely don't understand why these parts of the Social Security net aren't being reinforced especially in a place like Japan I found this interesting survey with uh with Japanese doctors

and they found that 30% of University Hospital physicians are at risk of death from working too many hours uh they also have a word for this the solution seems somewhat obvious and yet there are cultural and political barriers to getting it fixed the conditions in Japan's prisons aren't great solitary confinement is a is a commonly used strategy and the life in prison isn't necessarily good it's just better than what people are living on the outside I read this paper called Aging institutional thoughtlessness and normalization in Japan's prisons they talk about maybe some reform strategies that

we we could consider and I think these are appropriate even outside of Japan particularly this idea of normalization which is to make the prison system as similar to the outside world as possible so that people experience the least amount of shock when they transition between the two one of the ways to make it a place for rehabilitation is to have rules that would reflect the rules that you're expected to obey as a as a common citizen however this this is a challenging thing for a lot of people because a lot of people do have an

idea that prison is not necessarily a transitionary phase I I try to end on a on a on an optimistic note where I can but this is this is a Hard One to to end optimistically on what I will say is that Social Security Nets are things that are not preserved by chance right they're preserved because people stand up for them and the easiest way to stand up is to is to vote right it's at least the one thing that you can do it's worth investigating these things when you're voting in local elections what is

your you know local representative doing to build community in your area what are they doing about social care and elderly welfare in your area it can be easy to think of Boomers as people with privilege or people with everything that we want or we need as a younger generation but a lot are in the same boat as you are of just trying to get through the next day the next week or the next month