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Pensioner crimewave marks rise of the ‘Saga lout’.

       It is being dubbed the “grey crimewave” or the rise of the “Saga lout”. New statistics reveal that ever higher numbers of pensioners are being arrested and ending up in Britain’s jails.

       The prison system already struggling to cope with the demands of its own ageing population of lifers and long-term inmates, is struggling to cope with a new wave of elderly crooks. But experts are divided over whether or not the growing trend is due to people on low pensions turning to crime through necessity, or simply a tougher attitude by the courts to the elderly in the dock.

       In England and Wales, the rate of prisoners aged over 60 has risen 185 per cent in ten years. Prisoners aged over 60 are the fastest growing age group in prison. According to Bill Tupman, a criminologist at Exeter University, the increase in the elderly prison population is due to harsher sentencing policies which has resulted in the courts sending a larger proportion of criminals aged over 60 to prison to serve longer sentences. Police and courts are now “less likely to take pity on poor old granddad in the deck”.

       Over-60s are now the fastest-growing section of prison population. There currently almost 2, 500 people of this age group in British prisons, making up 3% of the total, up from 2% in 2003. Kingston prison in Portsmouth has become the first in the country to provide a special “elderly wing” with stairlifts and other adaptations.

        The “grey crime’ trend appears to be an international one. The number of Japanese prisoners aged 60 or older has doubled over the past decade. The rate of crimes by elderly people is 12, 3% and it is so far the highest among industrialized countries (USA: 5.4%, Germany: 3%, and South Korea: 3.5%). The crimes most often done by these people are 65% theft and 3.7% violence. There is one prison in Japan that has special facilities for the elderly: Onomichi prison in Hiroshima prefecture. Here staircases, baths and other parts of the prison are set up to make life easier for older inmates.

       In the Netherlands, where the same steep rise in offending pensioners has been monitored, along with the same pattern of offences, researchers found that a startlingly high percentage of over-60s appearing in court had undiagnosed dementia. It was only recently that the growth of criminal behavior among Dutch elderly people drew the attention of the media. Some newspaper articles of the past year: 86-year-old man with no previous record is caught shoplifting; an elderly couple, never having had anything to do with the law2, sells weed to the youngsters of their village; 78-year-old man suspected of cocaine smuggling; senior citizen (84) confesses to several cases of arson.

       With a steep increase in criminals aged over 65, Germany is planning to build them a special prison. Plans for the jail in Lower Saxony come at a time when elderly criminals have been in the news. Just weeks ago, police busted a fairly successful gang of bank robbers who had taken in? 400, 000 ($541, 000) in the last five years. The three men, who demonstrated their seriousness to bank employees with pistols, sledge hammers and hand grenades, were aged 63, 72 and 74. In Berlin, police seized a 75-year-old grandmother who specialised in sticking-up savings banks and in Dusseldorf, a 70-year-old woman was caught after four bank robberies. One female pensioner in western Germany has decided to fill the autumn of her life with something other than baking pies or watching the sunset from the warmth of her back porch. She is out gathering some cold, hard cash by robbing banks, at least four in the last four years. From the images captured on security cameras, " pistol granny, " as she's been christened by tabloids, has passed her 70th birthday already.

       Since 1995, the number of criminals aged over 60 in the German criminal justice system has risen by 28 per cent. Lower Saxony alone has 8000 pending court cases in which the accused are over 60. This means that the " Opa Gefaengnis" - the grandpa jail, as the media has dubbed it - must cater to inmates less interested in rehabilitation and more concerned with arthritis treatments and incontinence.

       Japan, France and Israel have all commissioned research into the rise of the pensioner-criminal. In August, a report by the French Centre d’Analyse Straté gique said the country’s criminal system would need to be overhauled to handle the growth in older criminals; police would require specific training on how to track “grey crime”, and jails would have to be modified to cater for inmates with Alzheimer’s disease and other illnesses.

       “The ageing of the population is going to lead to an almost automatic rise in crime by senior citizens”, the report concluded.

 

 

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