Chapter 3  Circumstances and Attributes of Elderly Offenders

Section 1  Analysis Based on Computerized Criminal Records

1 Introduction

  In this section the circumstances and attributes of elderly offenders will be described, mainly from a quantitative perspective, by showing the results of analysis based on trial data recorded on computers at public prosecutors offices (hereinafter referred to as “computerized criminal records”).
  The computerized criminal records consists of records of convictions in courts between 1948 through up to the present against natural persons having legal domicile in Japan, excluding those who were born in the Meiji era and before (i.e., persons who were born on July 29, 1912 and before). The Research and Training Institute of the Ministry of Justice randomly sampled one million offenders' records (hereinafter referred to as “One Million Non-Repeat and Repeat Offenders' Recorded Convictions”) from the computerized criminal records between 1948 through September 30, 2006 (hereinafter referred to as the “reference date”) excluding penal code offenses of criminal negligence, dangerous driving causing death or injury, and traffic-related special act offenses when we compiled the White Paper on Offense 2007 (Part 7, Chapter 3). We further extracted those who born between 1928 and 1936 (hereinafter referred as the “research subjects” in this section) as elderly offenders for our analysis (229,089 elderly offenders and the number of criminal records accounted for 402,252 cases.).The selected research subjects therefore are mostly limited to the elderly offenders aged 70 or older. The reason for this is that a buffer period of at least five years after becoming 65 years of age (until around 70 years of age) was considered necessary in studying the characteristics of elderly offenders. Consequently, of the research subjects, the number of offenders aged mostly 70 and 65 or older at the time of final judgment (hereinafter referred to as the “research subjects of elderly offenders” in this section) turned out to be 5,115 in 5,924 cases.
  In this section, the term “non-repeat offender” refers to a person who was convicted only once in his/her life time and the term “repeat offender” refers to a person who was convicted more than once (type of offence not necessarily being the same as the previous conviction). And “recorded conviction” means a trial record of where one was convicted in a final judgment. In regard to the counting rule used for the number of conviction records which offenders have, one final judgment was counted as one recorded conviction. Therefore, the “total number of recorded convictions” means the total number of convictions in final judgments recorded in respect of one person.