Poverty, isolation and depression. Sometimes because “it’s cold”, sometimes because “they’re hungry”, these women prefer to peep from behind bars rather than have a life outside.
“Some people do bad things on purpose and get caught so they can go back to prison if they run out of money,” an inmate at Tochigi, Japan’s largest women’s prison, in Tokyo, tells .
Yoko, fictitious name, is 51 years old, and has been arrested 5 times in the last 25 years for drug trafficking. Every time he comes back, he says he sees older people inside the bars. The problem is so big that the prison has started “asking inmates with nursing qualifications (like Yoko) to provide care” to the elderly.
“Akiyo”, an 81-year-old inmate, says that “there are very good people in this prison”, and even reflects: “Maybe this life is the most stable for me“.
Japan faces a problem of a large increase in the elderly population: there is a birth crisis in the country with the highest average life expectancy.
The loneliness of older people in the country is so alarming that a prison guard even told CNN that “there are even people who say that would pay 20,000 or 30,000 yen (124-186 euros) a month if they could live here forever“.
“There are people who come here because it’s cold or because are hungry“, adds the guard. “At this time, looks more like a nursing home than a prison full of convicted criminals.”
Inmates receive free health care, meals and help from staff to bathe, take medication and carry out daily activities. They also have access to company of other inmateswhich did not exist in the outside world.
They therefore choose to commit crimes to stay behind bars.
20% of people over 65 in Japan live in poverty, according to . They therefore decide to bet on crime. THE most common crime is theft: According to the Japanese government, 80% of elderly inmates in 2022 were imprisoned for this reason.
“Akiyo”, before being arrested for the second time (she had already been to Tochigi once), received a “very small” pension that was only paid every two months. “I made a bad decision and robbed a store, thinking it would be a minor problem,” he confesses.
But, in truth, the crime was motivated by psychological desperation: “I thought: ‘It’s not worth living, I just want to die’“, says the elderly woman.
“Being alone is a very difficult thing, and I feel ashamed that I ended up in this situation”, she added. “I really feel like if I had a stronger will I could have had a different life, but I’m too old to do anything now.”
Like her, there are many others in the same situation. The jailer explains that “even after they are released and return to normal life, they have no one to take care of them“, he said. “There are also people who have been abandoned by their families after having committed crimes repeatedly, they have no place to belong.”
