Elderly Women In Japan Are Choosing Prison Over Loneliness

Japan’s population, like much of the modern world, is aging and not producing enough babies to replace all the people entering their twilight years. These older years, which we typically associate with retirement, relaxation, and an assortment of new hobbies to fill your remaining time, are a rather dreadful prospect for some elderly Japanese people, who see nothing but lonely unfulfilling days ahead.

Couple that with the fact that 20 percent of Japan’s elderly population lives in poverty and it’s easy to see why some inmates at a Japanese women’s prison would rather stay locked up than be released into a world of solitude.

CNN ran a fascinating feature on the inmates of Tochigi Women’s Prison in Tochigi, Japan, a prefecture just north of Tokyo. Many of its inmates are elderly women who prefer the stability and community of prison over the realities of life on the outside.

It’s understandable. With so many elderly inmates, it functions more like a nursing home than a prison, one that provides those inside with better care and attentiveness and they would get on their own.

The women all receive necessary assistance as they walk, bathe, and eat. They receive regularly scheduled meals, free healthcare, and a sense of community and companionship that they would struggle to find outside the prison walls.

When faced with the prospect of being reintroduced to society, some of the prisoners, like 81-year-old Akiyo and 51-year-old Yoko, commit crimes just so they can go right back to prison, the one place someone their age wouldn’t be forgotten and neglected.

Yoko has served multiple sentences over 25 years for a variety of drug charges. “(Some people) do bad things on purpose and get caught so that they can come to prison again if they run out of money,” she told CNN.

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