TOKYO Tokyo police will try to rein in a wave of shoplifting by lonely elderly people by involving them in community service, a police spokesman said Thursday.
One out of four elderly shoplifters in the capital blamed their crime on loneliness, Japanese media quoted a police survey as saying. Another 8 percent said it was because they had "no reason to live."
More than half the elderly shoplifters said they had no friends and 40 percent of them lived alone, media said.
"Making shoplifters do volunteer work in the community is effective," the Tokyo Shimbun quoted J.F. Oberlin University professor Akihiro Sakai, head of a police research panel set up to tackle shoplifting, as saying.
"Instead of increased punishment, I hope we can rehabilitate shoplifters with special care."
A police spokesman declined to confirm the details of the survey but said it would be released to the public soon.
Elderly shoplifting cases in Tokyo reached all-time highs last year, nearly catching up with the number of cases involving young offenders.
People 65 years or older accounted for 23 percent of the 17,800 known shoplifting cases in 2008, more than doubling in the past five years, media said.
An example cited in the Ministry of Justice's annual report on crime describes a 76-year-old woman who turned to shoplifting several years ago as a way to battle loneliness after her parents died.
Over 20 percent of Japan's population is aged 65 or over, with that figure set to double by 2050.
(Additional reporting by Yoko Kubota; Editing by Isabel Reynolds)
NAIROBI Like many guys using the Tinder dating app, Sudan loves the outdoors and travels widely. The catch: he's the world's last male white northern rhino and desperately needs to mate.
PARIS French artist Abraham Poincheval, who famously spent a week inside a rock and two weeks inside a bear sculpture, has succeeded in hatching chicken eggs after incubating them for some three weeks.