Elderly crime in Japan

On Wednesday, 9th February, I attended the Osaka District court to witness the process of Japanese justice first hand. The cases I saw there were three petty theft cases. In the first, money had been stolen from an ATM machine. The total was around JPY200,000 or about AUD2500. In the second case the amount was more difficult to estimate as the crime involved stealing externally located water faucets from office buildings. The accused claimed to have received around JPY500 for each faucet and I can only assume that he was selling them for scrap.

The third case involved a theft of around JPY15,000 (AUD180). The accused had exhausted his funds at a pachinko gambling house and had decided that he would be able to easily steal money from people that had become drunk and passed out. He had been in the process of taking money from a drunken and apparently unconscious woman when she awoke and began to scream. He was apprehended at the scene.

These sorts of crimes are grist to the mill of any system of justice around the world. They were committed by the unemployed poor of the city and they were committed by men. They were petty crimes for relatively small amounts. The distinguishing feature though was that in all three cases, the crimes had been committed by older men. The first defendant was 60 years old, the second 62 years old and the third 59 years old.

In most of the world, the lower courts are filled with crimes of drugs and violence committed by young men with too much testosterone and too little education. Why then is the situation so different in Japan?

The circumstances of the three men were similar. They were all divorced or widowed and they had no contact with their children or family. They had no employment and little prospect of gaining employment. Their circumstances were at once poignant and baffling. Furthermore it appeared that they were not in the slightest bit unusual. I was told shortly after the hearing that Japan is undergoing a grey crime wave of sorts.

And it turned out that my information is correct. A Washington Times report dated 5 weeks prior to my visit to Osaka District Court describes the difficulties face by prisons in handling the influx of elderly prisoners, six months earlier Bloomberg had reported that “the number of arrests among people aged 65 or older tripled to 48,786 in 2008 from 1999” and in 2008 Reuters had reported that “crime by elderly Japanese has doubled over the past five years” and that while Japan’s population is certainly aging, “the number of such crimes is growing faster than the elderly population itself.”

There are more reports of the phenomenon, all with the same theme; the rate of crime among the elderly is increasing, the crimes are overwhelming petty theft and shoplifting, the causes are poverty and loneliness.

To me these reports seemed a little glib. Circular statements that opine that loneliness and poverty cause crime, the elderly in Japan are more lonely due to the breakdown of the traditional family and they are poorer due to the heavy burden of supporting an aging society. All this means that the elderly are committing more crime.

The academic literature did not offer much at all. There are few very articles examining the phenomenon. Most mentions of the elderly and crime in Japan either focus on the elderly as victims of crime rather than perpetrators, or focus on older men as perpetrators of sexual crimes against younger women.

An interesting paper written in 2004 attempts to explain the low crime rate in Japan. There's not much doubt that crime rates are low in Japan, their murder rate and violent assault rates are the lowest in the OECD. The 2004 paper suggests four causes of low rates of crime; 

1. Strong, informal social control mechanisms, 
2. Economic prosperity, 
3. Certainty of punishment and 
4. The aging population. 

Of these four, it is certainly the case that Japan’s economic success has diminished in recent times, but are there factors here that would affect only the elderly? Can the breakdown of social control mechanisms be partly responsible for the increase of crime among the elderly?

The strong, informal social controls tend to come from the sense of community that still exists quite strongly in Japan. The associated notions of “group” and belonging” also remain quite strong. For these elderly men however, it appears that the group has left them behind. They are at an age where they should expect to be the senior speakers for the group. Heads of their family, respected in their workplace, securely looking forward to (or even already enjoying) their retirement. These are the things that the group expects and by falling outside these expectations, these men have fallen outside the group. Their reaction appears to be a turning to crime, partly for the benefits of the crime itself, but also it would appear that they seek the security that their inevitable incarceration brings. Their incarceration places them back within a group and gives them security and certainty.

In 2006, the Japanese Justice Ministry was reported as being “so alarmed by the rise in geriatric crime that it has started a research project into its causes ... ‘We have no idea what is causing the rise in the elderly crime rate,’ said Yoshihiro Ono, a ministry of justice researcher”. I suspect that while we may have some idea what is causing it, there is still a great deal more work to be done.

This is adapted from a short essay written as part of my master's programme. If you're interested, I can provide references. The "2004 paper" is Roberts, A. and LaFree, G., (2004), “Explaining Japan's Postwar Violent Crime Trends”, Criminology, Vol 42, No 1; pg. 179