 Okay, let's start. Hello and welcome. My name is Fabio Gigi. I'm a lecturer in anthropology here at SOAS and I'm also the chair of the Japan Research Center. Thank you very much for coming, despite the strike and all the many obstacles that have been put in your way. Thank you also for joining us online. Today will be the last event for this year, but we already have a line of interesting speakers set up for next, so please do go back and visit the website. You can also subscribe to newsletter, so you'll get the information automatically. So now it is up to me to introduce the speaker for tonight, Dr. Jason Dannelly from the University of Oxford Brooks. He's a reader in anthropology and he is here because he had, I want to say something about juvenile delinquency that turns into age delinquency, but I'm sure you'll find that in the talk. I'm very happy to have you here. Jason has written several books about the experience of aging in Japan. He's done extensive fieldwork in Japan and also comparatively in England. His first book was called Morning and Lost. It was published in 2014 by Rutgers University and he has in between published an edited volume that takes a more comparative perspective between Europe and Japan, which is called Vulnerability and the Politics of Care Transdisciplinary Dialogues. His most recent book that appeared this year is called Fragile Resonances, Caring for All the Family Members in Japan and England. So please join me in welcoming Dr. Jason Dannelly. Here we go. Thank you so much for that introduction and yes, just to echo Fabio, this is wonderful to be here with all of you and thank you for coming out. I know it's cold. I know there are strikes. I know it's the end of the term and this is the last talk, so I really, really appreciate it. And then thank you to Fabio for inviting me to come here and be with all of you today and to the JRC. It's my first time doing a talk here for JRC, so yeah, it's wonderful. Okay, so the talk that I want to give today is, as you'll see here, it's inviting us to make some connections between different disciplines, anthropology, Japanese studies, criminology, geography, critical gerontology. And I hope that there are some of you in the audience who cross some of those disciplinary boundaries tonight, maybe more experts than me on some of these areas. I'm really looking forward to the discussion and questions afterwards and also the folks online. Are you going to tell them now? No, I'm just told because the light is a bit, it's harder to see. All right. There is a setting, sorry. Okay, let's set the mood. Exactly, it's called mood lighting and lecture mode with spots. Much better, I'm sorry. That's perfect, thank you. Right, so I've been working on this issue of the aging prison population in Japan, formerly incarcerated older people in Japan for a few years now. And this talk is kind of bringing together a few different publications that I have in different stages of publication process at the moment. So I hope it is not too disjointed in my mind. It all sort of flows together, but we'll see how it goes. I'm going to touch on a lot of different aspects of it. And I hope it makes a little bit of sense. And we can start to weave that together and hopefully the discussion and the questions will be able to facilitate that a little bit more. And I promise to give you a very full bouquet of loose ends and things to pull on. So lastly, I want to thank the Social Science Research Council and the Japan Foundation, whose Abe Fellowship Program funded this research. That's the little icon in the corner there. So the title of this talk is Aging Bodies in Carceral Circuitry in Host Welfare, Japan. And it's going to touch on all of these ideas of aging, of criminal justice, and so on. But it's also in a way a response, my response to something that Jason Scott recently mentioned in an article in American Ethnologists, where he called for an ideological ecosystem for abolition that spans academic, public, and militant spaces. An ideological ecosystem for abolition, what is that? To me, that means imagining alternative strategies and institutions, envisioning different ways that we might transform society to better care for each other and to relate, as Audre Lorde put it, across our human differences as equals. So abolitionism, in other words, means dismantling the relationships that produce things like ageism, things that devalue the older person as non-productive or as irrelevant, that reproduce and naturalize ableist and neuronormative discourses and representations. And while ageism is nothing new, of course, only very recently have older people been recognized as a group that has also been disproportionately affected by the current criminal justice system. So these different kinds of abolition conversations, I think, are coming together. And I see ageism as part of that conversation. And that's what I want to contribute a little bit to today in the example of Japan. So why is it that age and crime or these sort of carceral systems are coming together now? Let's go to the next slide. Am I advancing slides? No, there we are. Okay, wonderful. So the received wisdom from the beginnings of criminology, such as the work of this statistical sociologist, adult, in 1831, this held up the notion that even today that criminal behavior peaks in adolescence or early adulthood, and then it tapers off and declines with age, right? People age out of criminal activity. This is sort of the received wisdom. And this age crime relationship model has been so persistent that some have concluded that it is universal and invariant and owing to the physical, neuropsychological changes that occur in all of us and irrespective of your culture, irrespective of your social conditions, irrespective of history. So this is just one example of something I found, a recent study that again sort of reproduces this kind of knowledge that crime decreases with age, right? Over the last couple of decades, however, a growing body of research has called attention to the rapid rise of both the number of older people in custody and the proportion of older people within prison populations in countries around the world. So the aging trend has largely been driven by longer sentences, mandatory sentences, an increased prosecution of historic sexual offenses. So even if that doesn't really challenge that age crime relationship, it does mean that more older people are being affected by the penal system. So here's an example of that in England and Wales. Now it was reported a few years ago that the prison system is the largest care provider of older frail men in those countries. And in the UK, the number of prisoners over 50 tripled between 2006 and 2016, making again this a very large care provider. So it's a very rapid increase in the number of older people. Now again, this might be for crimes that were committed while folks were still younger and they were aging in the prison system as a result of longer sentences, or these might be historic crimes, right? A similar situation can be seen in the US where again one third of prisoners are projected to be over the age of 55 by the year 2030, a doubling in the span of a decade. Now you'll notice I've been a little bit sloppy with my statistics here, classic anthropologist error perhaps, but the threshold for what constitutes an older adult is kind of variable, right? Depends on the situation. Now typically in research with incarcerated individuals, the kind of threshold for being an older adult is 50, but it can range between 50 and 60. And this is partly based on the small numbers of incarcerated adults in the upper age brackets historically, but it's also because that past health research has shown that those in custody are on average physically comparable to adults that are chronologically 10 years or so older. So I'll try to return to this. This is one instance of a kind of uncanny doubling of the carceral body at this moment. But in Japan, let's look at the case in Japan now. You know, in Japan, it's pretty easy actually to find statistics not only of prisoners that are over 50, but even over 60. There are currently about 47,000 people in Japanese prisons at the moment. And across 75 different Japanese prisons and detention facilities, I should say, and around 9,000 of those are over 60. So similar to England and Wales, the number of older adults in Japanese prisons is, and this is the number of older adults 65 and older, has tripled between 1999 and 2019, while the proportion of the overall prison population has quadrupled. What is most striking, however, is that in contrast to prison populations elsewhere in the world, the majority of older people in Japanese prisons are serving sentences for offenses committed as older adults. So unlike these other countries, Japan's case does pose the kind of challenge to this age crime relationship that we're all used to, and we all assume, and really that the prison institutions are largely based on. So while Japan's overall crime rates are at their lowest in decades, 22% of all arrests are people over the age of 60. And the great majority of crimes committed by older adults in Japan are nonviolent property crimes like theft, shoplifting, and things that are classified as fraud, such as going to a restaurant and leaving without paying for your meal, right? So with these, most of these have short sentences less than two years, but with repeated offenses that can get longer. So and a lot of these offenders, of course, the older offenders are living with intellectual or cognitive disabilities, and an estimated 14% are living with symptoms of dementia. And these are just the folks that are in prison. So this is a chart. It's a little bit old here, but I just want to give you a sense of the picture. This trend has largely continued. It only goes up to 2013 here. Right here, we have a number of new older inmates by history of imprisonment. So the top part of that bar are people who have a history of being in prison six times or more. That middle sort of green bar are people who have been in prison two to five times. And the light blue bar at the bottom is first time offenders. So you can see very readily from this graph that as we have more and more older people in prison, you also see that large proportion are recidivists, right? When we look at the elderly rate, that the percentage of new older inmates among all new inmates, right here, it says 9.8. Now the number is more like 12%. So it continues to grow, it continues along this line. And so we not only have an increased number of older people in prison, but they're characterized by this, by reoffending, reoffending rate. Okay. So those over 65 have the highest recidivism rate of any age bracket in Japan. And this again is quite unique. Usually it's younger people that have more likely to reoffend. In Japan, it is those over 65. The great majority, I'm sorry, right. So more than one in five will return to prison within two years of release and almost half of these, of those reoffenders will be arrested within the first six months. If we extend our sort of post release period of five years, the rate jumps to almost 50%. Around 70% of older people arrested are recidivists. And those with six or more prior offenses now make up the majority of older incarcerated people. Okay. So why do so many older people keep returning to prison? That is a good question. And a complicated question. So I want to try to unpack it a little bit here. So between the years about 2016, 2018, the year I began field work in Tokyo on this problem, several major international news sources were asking these same questions about how can we understand this aging prison population, including the Financial Times and Bloomberg and the Atlantic and BBC, all featured stories on Japan's aging prison population. And most shockingly, according to these reports, many of these older people felt that incarceration gave them a sense of relief and comfort. They felt cared for in prison in ways that they didn't feel when they were living their lives on the outside. So an article in Bloomberg Business News, for example, listed several profiles of incarcerated women, including Miss T, age 80, who was serving her fourth term of two and a half years. So her crime was stealing cod roe, seeds, and a frying pan, two and a half years. In the interview, Miss T, she explained, I was in prison for the first time when I was 70, when I shoplifted. I had money in my wallet. And 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 I 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. The uncanny appearance of the odd yet ordinary collection of stolen goods is as strange as the accompanying photograph in the story of a woman standing in a factory by a sewing machine dressed in drab khaki prison uniform. Both of these images felt hauntingly lonely in different ways to me. So I imagine these objects composing a kind of domestic still life, but a strange one, a kind of alien imagination of home that suggests acts of feeding or being fed, yet no way that was incomplete and unable to satisfy. The pieces didn't quite come together. They indexed but did not embody homeliness. Listed in a police report, the objects take on another social and ethical meaning as as evidence, not of grief of a lost home, not of a broken family, but of a crime. I thought about my life misty reflected and I didn't want to go home. So the photograph too evokes this sort of context of gender domestic work. She's there at a sewing machine. And yet she is in this strange environment and there's this uniformed figure there in the shadows. And we're unable to see the look that passes between them. We can't see his face and she's turned away from us. But we might be led to wonder what's going on there. Is he a protector? Is he a threat? Is she looking at him the way she looked at her son who says she should go into a mental institution? Is he a paternal figure, right? After all, the sort of prison slang for correctional officers is Oyaji. Ms. T's statement, I can breathe, I can be myself and breathe, and that inverts the conventional view that prison is a space where one is cut off from the world, caught, confined, stripped of autonomy and individuality. But for Ms. T, it was the world outside, including her relationships with her family that made her feel anxious and trapped and suffocating. Away from this world, she exhaled. The circulation between self and the world was restored in this act of breathing. But how could home become so unhomely while the carceral could be a space to breathe? So at many points during my research, I would hear formerly incarcerated people tell me things like life in prison was easy, but life on the outside, that's hard. For them, like Ms. T, it seemed that the normal order of things had been inverted. Prison was like home, home was like prison. Life followed this rhythm of catch and release, repetition and return back and forth. In this context, I came to see the carceral, a kind of logic that links practices of discipline and control across spatial and temporal sites, as constituted not primarily by discrete institutions like laws and courts and prisons, but by the kinds of bodies and affects and subjectivities emerging through this process of circulation back and forth in and out, the stitchwork between worlds like breath. And so what was helpful for me in thinking through these kind of ideas of recidivism and repetition and the consonance between the sort of resonance between the outside and the inside was this notion of carceral circuitry that I take from carceral geography. Bless you. So this comes from an article by Gil and Conlan Moran and Burridge on carceral circuitry. And they write that in this piece, our intention is to make the notion of circuits do fresh work by exploring the real material and lived circuits that compose carceral systems as the basis for a new analytical window onto the empirical reality of interconnection across between and within, across between within and beyond carceral institutions. So they recognize that, you know, they're not the first ones to think about the way circuits work, the way in which the movement of people, a movement of bodies has been theorized in the past in ways that create value, for example, in ways that reproduce a population of surplus labor, for example. So we can talk about this, this circuitry, but they're very interested in this idea that these institutions like the prison, which seem very immobile, where you feel very stuck, there are these big walls that you can't get beyond are actually quite porous. And there are things that are moving in and out of prisons. And so we have to look at that context of movement. At the same time, they emphasize that circuits are closed, right? There is a kind of enclosure that's at work in this circuitous process. And so that is also important to recognize in this. The other idea that goes along with this and builds on this is this notion of carceral churn. So again, carceral geographers have adopted the term to describe both the violent movement of this circulation and the mechanistic quality of churning out these carceral subjects. So while carceral churn has mainly been applied to the kind of processing of individuals moving between prisons and jails and court holding cells and other sites of detention, other sites that we would normally sort of picture as places of detention. I want to try to sort of expand the scope of this and think in terms of the carceral a little bit more broadly. Here I have a quote from this article by Russell Carlton and Tyson on carceral churn where they say that carceral churn refers to the production of carceral subjects via the disciplined movement of people through the carceral circuits. This process, we argue, maps criminality onto bodies and feeds into a larger political project that funneled public funds towards police and prison buildup. So their discussion is more focused on that political project here. Again, I want to try to think more broadly and think of other kinds of circuitry and especially how this plays into the lived experience of older adults and how they experience the process of aging alongside this process of churn. Okay. So in the process, I want to include places where older adults might go after they've been released from prison, these kind of flop house rooms, these doya in different low-income enclaves, life on the streets, maybe different administrative offices that they have to face to get different kinds of benefits and so on, other spaces that reproduce forms of marginalization or exclusion, as well as things that push them back towards prison. So let me turn to an example from my field work now. Okay. So this is G, short for OG Sun. And G was the oldest recent graduate from prison, housed and aided by an organization called Motherhouse that I volunteered for during my field work. Motherhouse is a nonprofit organization that aids in the resettlement of recently released offenders and ex-offenders, not necessarily older people. But I first heard about G about a week into my field work when a phone call interrupted an interview I was having with the director of Motherhouse. So he took the phone call and when he came back from the call, he sank into his chair and he'd let out this big sigh and he said, he's done it again. 72 years old, and he's gone and got arrested again for stealing 20 yen out of a shrine donation box. 20 yen is about 12 p.m. in current exchange rates. But because of his record, because he's had prior history of incarceration, G was facing up to a year in prison for this latest incident. And if it wasn't for the director of Motherhouse who went to the judge to plead to have G's sentence suspended, it's very likely that he would have served his time. Having had a stroke about 10 years prior, he had quite pronounced speech impediment. He was very difficult to understand. He would get very frustrated as well when people couldn't understand him. He could be very sort of temperamental. But he also often became confused. And some of us suspected that the stroke and aging might have affected his cognitive functioning as well. So he's not someone who would perform very well in one of these formal courtroom kind of environments. So although he was soon released from detention with a suspended sentence, during the week that he was in detention, he lost his livelihood assistance benefits, his seikatsu hogo that he was living on. And as a result of that, he also lost his apartment. So he was coming out of detention. He was released, but he had nowhere to go and he had no money. The landlord from his former apartment found the apartment in terrible shape. There were holes in the walls and things like that, garbage everywhere. And so the director of Motherhouse had to find a way to pay for these damages, pay back rent and so on. And he wasn't too happy as well. But he did get G resettled, as you've seen him here in his new place. And several other ex-offenders and I would drop in on occasion and bring him food or cigarettes or things like that, check in on him. On these visits, we'd usually sit on this bed here. It's one of those sort of adjustable kind of hospital beds that you can get. And because of his mobility problems, G would rarely leave this bed or this room. We might watch sumo on TV, as you see here. And G would drink green tea out of an aluminum can that used to have pineapple chunks in it, according to the label. We would sit together for long stretches, often in silence. Sometimes he would turn away from the TV and he'd rummage through some papers on the table next to him. And some of these were papers from the ward office or different documents about his benefits or health appointments, things like that. He would read them, kind of look at them, read through them, go over them, might show me, put them down, pick them up, read them again, put them back away. The one personal item that stood out to me in his room though, and you can kind of see it in the back of all those papers, was the funeral portrait of his mother, propped up behind a small bowl for incense. Naturally, I asked him about this portrait. I look like her, don't I? He smiled. And I agree. Will you be buried with her? I asked, curious about their connection. No, I never got enough money for a proper stone for her. But nothing I can do now. I don't want anyone to be fussing over me spending money when I die. And then he smiled and said, I'm Mu'en Botoke, a disconnected spirit, a ghost. Now the notion of the uncanny is often associated with ghosts, with the supernatural, things that are just out of sight, spectral traces, nowhere, but nonetheless, unquestionably there. We might think about, for example, Susan Lepselter's work, her ethnography of uncanny experiences of UFO abduction, or the uncanny voicings of the spirits of the dead channeled on otherworldly volcanic landscape of Mount Osore in Marilyn Ivy's ethnography. Gee, not only lived with the ghost of his mother in a way, but he too was a kind of ghost, disconnected without a sense of home between worlds. He hasn't had contact with any of his family members since he, first time he was in prison, including his daughter. And they've become completely estranged since then. The narratives of the uncanny are always interrupted by the unsayable, these long moments of silence that we spend together. Why did he steal the money from the donation box? I couldn't help but think about that again and again. He just gave a shrug. I was hungry, he would say. Now in Freud's famous work on the uncanny, I remember that he recounts the shocking encounter with old age, his own age. He's sitting alone in a train compartment when the train is jolted and suddenly he sees what he calls an elderly gentleman invade his compartment, only to realize that this figure whom he expressed an immediate dislike for was in actuality his own reflection in the looking glass of the open door. In this anecdote, the old man is at first seen as a trespasser onto Freud's private room, his disrupting his work, his sense of security, instantly filling the air of attention. He was unrecognizable at first as the double. In other words, he was this part of Freud that Freud did not wish to recognize. Kathleen Woodward calls this a future absence, right, old age, the thing that we do not wish to recognize. So the figure of the double then, which is nothing more than something that is familiar, returning in distorted form, is also described by Lepselter again as the return of what we cannot bear to know, again, the unrecognizable thing that we do not wish to recognize, aging. And so I think there's a certain resonance with this repetition, right, of age, also the repetition of recidivism that's going on here. And I want to try to draw these two together in a way. So, and we see that here often G would also sit on his bed, sort of looking outside or looking at himself in this reflection, again, in silence, confronting, in a way, this figure of aging. So just as we had this repetition and this double, this uncanny eruption of age in Freud's example, you know, I think that we're seeing here with this growth of the aging prison population, another kind of example of this sort of eruption, this sort of return of what has been repressed in society, right, this dark side of aging. And I don't think it's coincidence necessarily that we see a rise, a rapid rise in the older prison population. At the same time that we're seeing a kind of de-institutionalization of elderly care. At the same time, we're seeing a amping up of this discourse of successful aging, active aging, right, these models of living well in the community, right, aging in place. All of these things were bombarded in Japanese society by this notion that we have to take responsibility for age and to be fit and healthy to the end of our lives, right, this notion of this compression of morbidity. And yet this doesn't really fit the reality of the situation, right, where in a lot of ways we see what has been called the post-welfare state, right, or what others have called the re-familiarization of Japanese elder care, where we, the long-term care insurance system that is there in place, that is promoting this ideal of independent aging, healthy aging, successful aging is not able to relieve the burden on families and families are less and less able to care for older family members. And so we just have more and more older people who are living alone, who are living isolated, and who are increasingly also living in poverty and in these kind of situations. So in many ways I found this similar, this went to research I've done previously in communities and on care of older people, where they're really worried about Kodokushi, or these lonely deaths. I see this loneliness as something that is running through this. But if we promote this kind of successful aging model, if we choose to see that kind of aging, which in a way is an anti-aging or a no-aging model of aging, then the more we try to repress and the more that we see this return of this sort of dark side of aging, the more we see the criminalization of older people who are not connected with family and who are reminding us of this deviant body of aging, not the Kodokushi kind of picture of welfare. Okay. There's also a kind of Kodokushi beautiful kind of picture of rehabilitation after, what is called rehabilitation or resettlement or recovery after prison. And this other kind of circuitry that is imagined in this paradigm. But for most of the older formerly incarcerated people that I talked to, this kind of thing didn't make sense. One said, I don't understand this business of rehabilitation. That everyone's talking about. Another older ex-offender told me this when we were looking at these kind of flyers for recidivism prevention campaigns. This is Hogo-chan, the mascot of course for the probation and parole system in Japan. That's of course to inspire you to stay out of prison. So he said, I can't return. I can't return as rehabilitation and things like that kind of suggest. I can't return to the way things were. And anyway, if I did, I'd probably end up doing the same things that got me into prison. So I'm looking for work, but no one wants to hire an old guy. There's nothing to do. I asked another man how he felt since his release only a couple months earlier. And he said, you know, it's in there. I have this feeling, my kokoro. I don't really know how to explain. I don't think I can face other people. And I can't tell anyone about where I was or what I did. So it's like this wall or fence between me and the life of ordinary people, even though he was outside. Again, that image of capture, of suffering, of enclosure in that carceral circuitry, compelled to go back to resettle, to reintegrate, to recover, trying to move forward blocked by the aging body, by the stigma of incarceration, by administrative systems of welfare and bureaucracy, returning again to custody. Older ex-offenders were caught in the carceral churn. Okay. I'm going to switch settings a little bit. And some of you may recognize this. Another place where I did a lot of my field work and learning about aging and carceral churn was Sanya. Sanya is an area of a few blocks in Northeastern Tokyo. It used to be a major day labor hub until the work stopped and the workers got older. Now some call it a kind of Fukushimaji, a kind of welfare town. As I walked closer to the center of town, the building facades and the fonts on shop signs that maybe used to exude a kind of useful exuberance now looked very just dingy and dusky with Spatina of age. I recognize this kind of landscape from my time growing up in Detroit felt kind of familiar. Sanya seemed like a place where time had stood still and where you could get trapped in the inertia if you stopped walking for a moment. So I was on my way that day to visit another nonprofit that provides temporary shelter and support to people who are poor and unstably housed. The more and more of the people that they help are formerly incarcerated older men and women referred to them from the local community resettlement support center. As I was approaching my destination one day in Sanya, I was called over. They joined a small group of men seated on the ground in a narrow strip of shade across from a small bar. When I told them that I was there to learn about older people who had been to prison and they laughed and they're pointing at each other and say oh you know something about that. I turned around and then one man turned around and he lifted the back of his shirt up and showed me his tattoo. And then another one sort of you know just kind of brushed that off and said hey there's a lot of guys in prison nowadays most of the old guys around here in Sanya have been to prison a few times but if you want to know ask granddad over there how old are you granddad 100 and he's been to the worst of them. So they motioned over to another older man sitting on a metal folding chair drinking with the others and while they all had some gray hair this man was clearly older than the rest. While they'd been joking he had kept statues still just kind of staring out over them. He appeared very frail in fact and hardly the way they one would imagine someone had been to prison several times so I asked him if he had been to prison and he nodded. So why do why do people go back? I probed and he looked at me sternly oops and he said you've been in once you go a second time if you've been in twice you go a third. I waited for him to continue but he simply leaned back and lived another cigarette. The old man's words looped around in my head the rest of the day. Now I'd known that you know if you had a history of past incarceration that was probably the greatest predictor of future incarceration but it was the way that he said this right the cadence the rhythm if you've been in once you go a second time if you've been in a second you go a third right. It reflected this kind of temporal swing of life in places like Sonya where things appeared both heavy and simultaneously in motion right this kind of atmosphere of churn. The aging of the Sonya population that my interlocutors reflected was something evident from the field work I conducted while accompanying the volunteers and NGO workers. Most of them those the folks that I met in Sonya were economic migrants from rural provinces spent their adulthood in precarious work had no savings or pension security in old age. The average age of those registered for day labor in Sonya is 62 years old and a large portion I don't know the exact number I've seen different numbers as much as 90% receiving Seikatsu Hogo livelihood assistance like G. The jovial warmth and free spirited charm that marked the day of benefit disbursement which is the day I met these guys on the road was short-lived and like life in criminal communities was full of betrayals. One reformed Yakuza I met described places like Sonya as a world without affection love connection a world of loneliness and solitude where friendships only exist for a moment when there's money and drink around and then they're gone. So as the days passed the high spirits would fade and the numbers in the soup kitchens places I volunteered would swell 200, 250, 300 warming up with a bowl of stew or curry and rice until finally the next payday would arrive. This regularity was always disrupted of course by the contingencies of life health problems removal of benefits for some reason or another and of course arrests. Sometimes one would cascade into the other cycling within different repetitive iterations of the car's roll. The cycle of suffering that characterized everyday life in Sonya resonates with the kind of Buddhist worldview taught by prison chaplains since the 19th century in Japan. Ex-offenders still refer to life outside of prison, oops here as Shaba a term derived from Buddhist moral cosmology referring to the mundane world of illusion and suffering a world where actions have consequences and transgressions bear karmic punishment. For the older ex-offender Shaba was not only a place outside the wall hey no soto but a time out of joint momentary comforts uncertain survival uncanny repetition. If there's an image of Shaba that haunts me the most it's this one in Sonya this is a temple there that's located near the grounds of a that used to be an execution grounds right located in Sonya you can see on the banner there something that's recognizing that former execution grounds there so this was the place where the the bodies the remains of those executed would be inter taken care of. These execution grounds were located there until 1873 and this was about the time the year of the first prisons in Japan were sort of modern prisons in Japan so it symbolizes kind of transfer of from one kind of mode of discipline and punishment to another. So while the execution grounds have been erased from the landscape the traces of its violence still haunt this massive stone statue of the bodhisattva jizo this is a kubikiri jizo and decapitation jizo still watches over the ground in Japanese Buddhism of course jizo stands at another bridge watching over the souls passing from one world to the other stone and spirit stillness and moving the image was a kind of spectral thread that knit these worlds together for most formerly incarcerated older people Shaba was still a place could also be a place of refuge as well where one might hope to find a little bit of work get signed up for some benefits get some help from a charity perhaps at least remain inconspicuous and avoid the kind of stigma of incarceration that you might get outside of those kind of areas. Performally incarcerated older adults without a place in the normative temporal modes of belongings such as family or work or community associations for older people precarious freedom of life outside prison had its limits prison life wasn't free I was often told but at least it offered a kind of rhythm and a sense of regularity and even care for a sense of home so I'm going to skip ahead a little bit here so one of the staff members of this nonprofit that helps to resettle older individuals tried to explain to me he said that in prison you don't have you don't have to think about anything in the world with others second you have to think you have to think about everything you have to worry about things renting an apartment what should I do for food today what will happen if my livelihood assistance runs out you have to think about so much in prison there's none of that the staff member echoed the sentiments of other advocates of aging and disabled people like Yamamoto Joji who noted that older serial reoffenders see prison not as punishment but rather as a refuge from the cold and harsh society the society that perhaps that does not want to recognize them that does not want to see this double in them these days specialist okay this is sort of a classic depiction probably of a cell where people would be in a Japanese prison but things are changing in this right specialist facilities are now being made to accommodate older and frail individuals special accommodations for cognitively impaired prisoners meanwhile juvenile offender facilities are starting to close or be consolidated and prisons are having to hire staff who are professionals in elderly care and train correctional officers to accommodate the changes in care understandably prompting comparisons to homes nursing care homes right this line between again the carceral outside and inside is bleep being blurred I'm sorry I'm skipping over a little bit but I'm happy come back to these kind of thoughts as well a little bit later but I'm going to wrap it up I don't want to leave us on such a dark note here in a way because again I'm trying to respond to this call for imagining an ecosystem for abolition right I'm imagining alternatives to this carceral circuitry to this carceral churn I do believe that by tracking individuals through the carceral churn allows us to see age as more than a static characteristic of offenders but rather as a process of embodying these linkages between different places even places of disconnection prisons rehabilitation houses shelters places that make up the carceral circuit of carceral churn in a super age society dominant models of resettlement based on useful bodies and independent aging fail to recognize the ways in which these ex offenders embody time the way they do their time the rhythm of this unsettled heart the churning grind of survival on livelihood assistance for example the back and forth from the easy inside to the uncertain outside the increased attention to the situations of older and disabled people in Japanese prisons has prompted some movements towards limited criminal justice reform however these reforms are unlikely I think to produce any substantial change unless they are linked to broader abolitionists and anti-ages projects and collaborations with ex offenders themselves dismantling carceral churn requires new infrastructures that can empower community organizations with specialists in support of older people and this requires and also a new kind of existential architecture or interpersonal architecture one that heals and provides hope and can be the foundation of new networks for relational life to emerge across ages and other forms of distance so I wanted to show you these two last pictures I took of G and the picture on the right is G and one of the other ex offenders and this was on a visit to a clinic where he was being screened for dementia and it was a it was a nice moment in a way I mean he he was a I mean this could be a very dark moment right people don't want to know be diagnosed with dementia but he seemed quite a piece with it and I think he was quite happy to have us around with him taking him to this looking after him in this way and of course the staff there the clinic staff are always misrecognizing us that somehow connected to him part of his family maybe who else would be doing this so it was almost as if in that context we had sort of built other kind of ties right alternative ties and we can kind of imagine that different space the space on the left is is a room and mother house the kind of open cafe area and yeah here we have children that are coming into this space and G is kind of hanging out there it's kind of a warm open space here again reimagining what community could be in a kind of different non-judgmental way I'm happy to talk a little bit more about that and more about the kind of ways in which I think there are these experiments happening and these third spaces in which someone might be able to exit this kind of carceral circuitry in a way but I will leave that to you in questions and I'll wrap it up there thank you very much everyone thank you online well thank you that was a very fascinating insight it's quite a good topic for Christmas I thought as well you know as we deal with well you know with some very very much similar issues of connection and loneliness I wanted to start us off into discussion with two things I thought one really interesting thing was that the fact that you sort of started off with the idea okay maybe there's something expressive about the act of committing a crime and what is stolen and yet the pan and the mentaiko and the seeds and that sort of it creates the particular kind of picture but it wasn't it didn't really go anywhere yes you reckon that is that there's something at the pan there's something something homely about it but really it doesn't come together as a thing it's not a meal or anything and then of course the second part of the talk focused on the function of committing the crime literally I mean when Jisan stole 20 yen for which you can't buy anything or hardly anything really when he said well I was hungry but clearly there was the idea that this it had a different function it was meant to get him to a different place I think that that distinction is really quite interesting because when you think of the sort of the crime statistics in western cities for example where you have similar problems with urban alienation vandalism is sort of a big thing right and vandalism in that case is usually it's read as an expressive act it's to destroy something symbolically that that symbolizes part of society that that you sort of indirectly attack but here there isn't there is I don't know whether whether whether you saw anything that is sort of similar to that it seems that people were quite clear if I steal something even something small hopefully I'll be arrested and then I'll be taken care of again yes I was hoping that you would pick up on that I know you're interested in uncanny objects of all sorts and and I was hoping to to bring that that as a thank you for asking that question yeah I think it's important to I wanted to point out how when we're talking about carceral circuitry I guess it's not only about people but you know objects are sort of included in this enveloped in this objects that move from one place to another and suddenly become something else symbolically and I think the objects you know maybe when she picked them up in the store they're they're one thing and when she gets the thought that I'm just going to leave and not pay for these and maybe I'll get away with it maybe I won't they become something else and then when she's caught and they're they're become loaded with a different kind of symbolic weight right so I think objects to get caught up in this in this turn right the 20 yen right that symbolic kind of thing I think the reading I've come across a lot of examples of this in fact that the kind of official statistics say that the average value of the object stolen by older adults and the most of this is shoplifting the average value comes out to about 3000 yen right so in most cases it's very little right and it is this you know crime is kind of symbolic right and this is sort of showing that I think it's not probably I mean I've been thinking about this a lot too and this act of theft why is theft and shoplifting so prevalent why is that the crime of choice right it's not for everyone right and especially I think if you want to be in prison for longer you're going to do something else because you're going to get a very short sentence for kind of shoplifting and I don't think that we can just say well it's just this sort of rational thing that they're they're poor they're hungry they're desperate right as we can see in the case of Ms. T she had money I know there are folks that I talked to say well I had money but I did it anyway and I think this this sort of act of stealing of sort of violating or inverting those sort of norms of of consumerism right to me with the increased marketization of eldercare and that kind of welfare landscape right that this idea that we're sort of shopping for care in Japan these days this act of stealing seems like a you know in the same way as vandalism I kind of you know potentially sort of politically loaded at whether intentional or not right that becomes the mode in which these this isn't expressed right this I'm easy this anxiety is expressed those who can't live up to that sort of idea those that can't be involved in that market economy of care that this is kind of a refusal of that yes and that makes perfect sense yes I have lots of other questions but please I'm sure there's questions in the room and maybe there's also something online this or is that an is that an old question Sharon's got oh yeah shall I shall I read it out under that you can think you can tell you about Sharon hello Sharon thank you very question so the question is is there a connection with the baby boomer dankai generation and the openness of these people to crossing the line and considering prison as an alternative way of attaining care there seems to be a sort of boldness that might be also by the certain kind of generation with a certain kind of earlier life I think that's very interesting I remember being told by a woman who's a former probation officer I was talking to her about this why we have this sort of decline in juvenile offenders and you know that's partially you know the reason why we have a growing proportion of older people in the prisons and she just kind of said well you know genki ga nai like you know all young people these days genki and you know and these these older people that generation dankai no serai they're genki right there they're going to do these kind of thing right and so there might be something to to this you know that's an interesting theory and and there is a sort of logic there that there would be this kind of generational connection perhaps but I don't know I do I do certainly think that there is something perhaps to the experience of the ways in which life has changed for people over the course of their lifetime right so you know the situation of the sort of welfare environment of the care system and things like that that's changed like longevity has changed you know families have changed and quite rapidly and you know the the kinds of ways of life perhaps that a lot of these guys and you know in the yosuba and places like that used to live and right that that sort of environment has changed a lot right and and so that that might be so maybe this generation is quite genki and they're you know it's difficult for them to to then change that into you know what the current climate is or something I'm not sure but certainly not everybody of that generation right it's not characteristic of that there's lots of other people who have different trajectories follow different trajectories in age right so there's something thrilling about it I'm sure even at any age right to think okay I'm just going to take these things just going to walk out and see what happens and you know maybe yes but I like the idea of boldness is definitely right right so so that is interesting a lot of times people didn't really want to talk about what they did that ended up that you know getting them into prison right but that would be really interesting to to to be able to to to look more into that sort of effective dimension of of of that I think it's one way yes yes please thank you Jason I was really interested in the relationship between community in your work with with the NGO and and in your interviews and notions of transgression it seemed that uh you were kind of swinging between creating a community for people when they were ex-offenders and then when they were in the interviews when they were alone and they were disconnected they transgressed in order to be entered the car in prison community so I wondered if you think that's an impression that that was a total problem through your work with the NGOs whether um you know the g-san was was reading perusing her bureaucratic bureaucratic notes from the state uh it was kind of it was kind of an act of connection with the state do you think about something which which can be worked upon is this a community working that comes so that's interesting yeah I mean it was almost like you know the way someone would read through letters or Christmas cards or something like that you know they're they're kind of scattered there they're kind of something that he wants to connect with but it's difficult to say you know maybe he's thinking I gotta remember I got an appointment or something like that maybe there's just something that keeps coming up in that way but um yeah I think that's a that's an interesting observation I do I do think that it is there is a need for creating different spaces of connection right so the the typical model of sort of ex-offender resettlement is go back to work right get a job once you get a job you'll you'll have money you'll be able to resettle you'll be fine um that is so all of the effort is put on getting a job older people can't get jobs right a lot of especially if you're older and disabled um the other way is to go back to your family right and most of these older people they're they're estranged from their family a lot of times the stigma of incarceration is so great families just cut off the ties right um and so those kind of modes of of relationality are really just foreclosed on them what do they have left they have these sort of you know there are sort of these temporary sort of transient modes of community that they might find in a place like Sonya but again I want to emphasize that it is really quite precarious for a lot of people especially ex-offenders so um so I think there needs to be uh I think more greater visibility I think we need to uh have more of a voice for these people I need that needs to be destigmatized right in a way and I think more encounters and more sort of chances uh to to meet people uh across these divides of age as equals um right uh is is important is is critical for this right um and so um I see Hibiki-san there in the back but I think uh you know arts uh and uh those kind of activities right that looks across these different boundaries in lots of different ways for example and connect people are something that are really important right right now those kind of arts or those different kinds of connections uh are not being made especially with people that are inside of prisons right so we need to be able to lower that wall a bit get the outside you know sort of organizations into prison working with people before they're released you have them outside in the communities right uh working perhaps with the formal care system but also um you know with uh ex-offenders with artists with others right uh and the community in Delta it's a very ambitious kind of vision perhaps um but I think it's where we have to go that's a very good question I don't know the answer it's a little clever getting to the point where the business should have the vote on that yeah interesting to know that they'd be able to think about the space and society about it hmm that's interesting I have to look that up thank you anybody else yeah I do think I having a more of a political voice in some way right it's important inside of these toji-shara uh groups and movements I think are important for that a lot of these um but anyway other questions yes yeah um probably and not a very good thing to think but um do you think um like it's the problem with the prison systems being very accommodating so a very attractive place for these people to go to um was it possible that this is a failure of the prison system so if it's made not as comfortable yeah then people won't want to go in in the first place do you think that could be the case yeah I'm not I'm not sure that would be a case I mean lots of ways in which prisons are not comfortable places right um I mean you're constantly under watch for example right kind of everything you do is on is being watched here you're in this environment with with all these other people right and it's I mean there are some ways right and Miss T was saying you know like she's got work and it's good and she feels valued and these things and a lot of you know uh older people kind of say this is you know the only place I can I belong right or the stigma of incarceration doesn't matter so um but I think as long as there are older people in there they got to be taken care of right or else this is really you know we're talking about cruel and unusual um and right on a human rights level that that is just not right um so um I I agree that I mean I I do think that we should be working on alternatives to prison rather than making the prisons nice or maybe we should have alternatives to prison for people who are disabled who are have dementia of people who are older to be able to go through rather than prison and we need more of those um so that's important we also need more sort of education of people you know throughout this sort of you know you know from police to to you know judges to all these people that are involved in that uh in order to get older offenders who um yeah into those spaces right to those alternatives yeah so I agree um I mean one sort of paradoxical thing is that it's the disciplinary regime that seems to be the attraction the regimentation the idea because you describe very good you know the sort of the temporal dimension that and that's that's very sort of it's a common experience also described by you know in ethnographies of homelessness this idea that if your home is essentially the temporal horizon is today you never think beyond that and there's there's there's there's no resources and and the time to even think beyond what's happened you're so occupied with doing whatever you need to do to survive here and now that there is no beyond that and what you have in prison is is quite the opposite you have a regimented day that is always probably the same and it's so regimented that it's you you can completely give up um you know you don't have to think about what's happening next it will happen almost automatically yeah I did find it interesting I went to I visited a couple of um older ex-offenders in uh who were then transferred to kind of nursing homes or care homes after um they were released and uh uh it was um other kind of uncanny experience right because they um you know you could tell they were in the prison right there the rooms were spotless you know they were totally clean everything was lined up one guy even had written his his prisoner number like on on the on his like bottle of toothpaste right it was all lined up there on his on his sink so in ways these these embodied sort of habits of of the carceral um environments have sort of carried over transferred well actually very model person in the nursing home right um but um that's a bit disturbing as well isn't it and then settling there's two more questions online all right so shall I read them okay so one says um when older people are given their sentences is there an awareness in the judicial system that these people want to be in prison are seeking care uh and how do they respond to this um that's a great question Anastasia um and I don't know and I think it's probably case by case um I I don't think that really ends up mattering in the end that's my impression of the the cases that I know about um it's uh they look at your your record they look at you know if there's evidence of the crime and unless there is someone there that's sort of advocating for you or family member something like that um then you are likely to get prison time rather than a suspended sentence um and that's been my impression so the ways in which you know presence of family is something that can divert you from this carceral circuitry I think is important um and it makes it very clear to me at least that what we're doing is criminalizing people who don't have those family connections right the people that we don't want to see that sort of dark side of aging again um I hope that answers your question in some way Anastasia um always things more things to know Sadie says would it reduce recidivism better to increase investment in social care rather than investment in appropriate provision for the elderly in prisons um I do think that there should be an increase in investment in in social care um I think uh and in some places this is happening right so they have these community resettlement support centers uh in Japan um this started in 2012 um they're across all the prefectures in Japan um but it's it's very uneven right so the you know basically the prefecture has given some money and said you got to set up some kind of resettlement center uh and uh figure it out based on what you need in your prefecture and they use the money how they want to and um uh it's it's you know sort of not a very good and necessarily a good system and it all sort of is based again on these private companies that are contracted by the state as well um some do it some do it well and you can see you know I think those models uh should be should be you know looked at more closely um but uh yeah it takes a lot of work so it does take this investment Sadie it does take this investment um you know it takes a lot of sort of social workers and and coordinating with the community and coordinating with different institutions uh and following up on on people constantly um and doing a lot of that work so it does take investment um and uh but you know how much would it save yeah right because the you know having someone in prison for such minor crimes over and over again uh is also extremely costly uh to Japan so um are there any other questions here and I know there's another question online yes that's yeah yeah I just want to ask you about the two things and first one is uh about research methods uh your research and how do you build relationships with uh the people you research because you know I think uh there are many complicated things that but when to into the process of uh talking to people about kind of very high wage and sense uh yeah so yeah I'm just wondering the research methods and the second question is yeah actually uh with our hundred thousand okay uh I tried to interview with something for living in Samya and uh he had experience uh in the prison and uh and he said he started living on the street because he didn't want to go back to the prison and uh and at the same time he said of course once he entered once we get into the prison he gets the clothes and the clothes and shelter but uh more than that he didn't like the feeling of being tied to someone and by someone yes and he's about 15 years old so I think it was in the opportunity to uh make some choice to spend time on the street so we present uh we can be able to do all the work uh but I'm just wondering uh did all the people who researched the nation answered about the findings and rules and so it's an interesting question yeah thank you very much um yeah I think I'll try to answer these quickly um I'll do the second one first right so um yes they I mean they did often talk about how it you know there was no freedom in in prison right um that was sort of a common thing uh I don't know if you know that you use quite use those words of being sort of bound down there but I think especially in Samya you find a lot of guys who you know throughout their lifetime have been very independent right going out on their own maybe moving from somewhere else you know being a you know day labor or something like that where they're sort of making their own way and I think that kind of personality right was kind of prevalent among a lot of people that I I met there um so even saying you know I'm fine I can I can be on the on the streets you know and those guys are tough and they're resilient in a lot of ways right um when they get older when you're talking about in your 80s and things like that you know there's more things that come up perhaps but um so it's so things might change for this individual I'm not sure um but again I think there are different these different trajectories in different ways different ways in which people might end up in prison not necessarily voluntarily I don't want to say that's the only way um the other thing about methodology um yeah um I just spent as much time as I could in in these places uh and uh tried to uh I worked with uh different work with I did volunteer right uh with these different organizations doing different things so I was there every day all day just talking to whoever I could um building rapport building sort of a relationship um and people knew what I did they knew who I was and um you know gradually when I built these relationships then when I get introductions or I would get um you know different sort of doors would open um and uh some some individuals were happy to talk with me some not um and um so that's that was sort of it's a bit messy um but um but that's that was my sort of initial um way uh I mean Sonia was a tricky place to to do that research I mean you really do have to commit to to really being there for a long time with folks um because again there's hard to build trust in a situation like that so going through the NGOs working through them they really knew the area well and um we're able to help me out um so good excellent that's one more class question here great oh oh Peter has oh all right um oh and Sharon said she had to leave goodbye Sharon um all right so uh and says um thank you for your presentation what is the gender distribution of the elderly in the carceral system in Japan seems like there are more elderly male prisoners but what's the percentage of women can you tell us more about why the recidivism rate is highest among elderly in prison in comparison to younger inmates are there programs in place for re-socializing the imprisoned elderly lastly um what are types of elder care provided in prison um okay lots and lots of questions there um I uh thank you and thank you and for all of us um so I wasn't able to enter into Japanese prisons and do a kind of prison ethnography there unfortunately but these are very difficult places to get inside and as you may know so it's really difficult for me to say much it's all very second hand third hand about what happens as far as elder care provided in prisons I know that in some prisons they do have these sort of specialist wings and special care for older people but this is not the norm and uh from what I heard mostly about from from slightly younger uh ex-offenders who um you know were telling me about older people in prison were the ways in which other prisoners had to be caring for um the the older and disabled prisoners um so if someone needed changing their their you know diapers their clothes uh taking a bath if they needed help with any of those things it was often the other ex-offenders that were told you have to do that and help them out um and uh they weren't giving any any instruction there was no training or anything they were just told do it and so they had to learn on the fly and it's not the best kind of care um so uh that was uh the kind of picture that I got most clearly um but again I think this might be changing gradually unevenly um but uh that's one thing um another thing is about gender uh there um which I do think is important again um partially there's a you know methodology access issue I wasn't able to um interact that much with um all their female ex-offenders um so uh so it's difficult for me to say too much about that um it is a much smaller group than than men um as it is in most places uh in the world uh where we have um so uh and um you know from what we can tell by things like statistics um I can't I can't say how much they are they I know that they are also a growing proportion of the uh female incarcerated population growing even faster I think than um than the male incarcerated population but again that's because probably there's a lot fewer female uh prisoners in general um so statistics are kind of hard to judge there um we know their numbers are growing uh we know that you know 80 percent of the the crimes uh that are landing women in prison are shoplifting um uh things like that but we've also know that uh there there seems to be uh and this is from other people's research uh with uh older female ex-offenders uh more mention of domestic issues so kind of like Ms. T. there sometimes there are conflicts at home sometimes there are things happening in the family that uh are um sort of propelling them uh um to commit a crime uh whereas in the case of the men it's more of these isolated men so that seems to be a very important different gender experience sorry do we let's let's say Peter okay nice question I'm sorry I didn't answer all of your questions and but let me go to Peter's question near the end of your talk I think you mentioned that Japan has an unusually high proportion of older people in its prison population um a start of your talk sorry uh is this because the proportion of total older people in prison is unusually high in Japan or rather the opposite that the proportion of younger population in prison in Japan is unusually low uh and as you suspect yes um it's low and it's declining uh for the younger people right so the the numbers of older people in prisons have sort of leveled off in recent years um but their proportion has has grown um a bit uh and again that's because overall crime rates are declining and that's mostly we have fewer and fewer younger people in there uh and that's this question about you know what's what about younger people uh why are they they not um reoffending as much as older people um and I think that is because more often younger people are um released on parole right and they're they're getting out to finish their sentence in the community because they have a family member or something that agrees to act as their kind of guarantor uh most older offenders don't have that guarantor and so they they get out on monkey shackle they do their whole sentence in prison and they get out and they get sort of no support right the younger offenders they'll get probation officers they'll get checks they'll get a lot of assistance with finding jobs um there's a lot of resources that tend to be focused on them and historically this is the sort of the case the model is okay young people are the offenders so we come back into the community and um get them a job and things like that um but now uh that's not so much the case and the system has not adjusted um and there aren't yet uh the kind of strong supports for older people so in addition to having you know more support for people uh coming out on you know this after serving their full sentence i think that it would be good for japan to look again at these rules about parole um and uh trying to get guys out earlier uh and women as well um uh into the community and have this transition period um and you know it the data shows that if you if you do that the recidivism rate is much much lower i think that's a big part of it right excellent okay thank you very much i think that's these are all the questions um it's a very interesting discussion thank you also for the participants online join me in giving a big round of a round of a sorry it's been a long day a round of applause though turning german for an excellent talk um join us again i hope you have a very nice break uh do take care don't fall down don't go skiing too dangerous um and do join us again on the 11th of january first week of new term we have our first event um with the artist translator and writer poly barton i already booked i already registered i'm so excited for poly barton excellent yes no it will be it will be sort of a mixy when we'll just have a conversation but it will be an opportunity also for you to ask questions about her experience in japan about her writing she's won the essay prize fits geraldo um essay prize for her long essay on the japanese language for 50 sounds it's really an amazing i recognize so many moments and i thought yes this is exactly it this is a why didn't i think of that so yeah so please do come back and have a safe journey home and good switching off on the online side thank you all right thank you everyone