I've imagined a world where prisons and homeless shelters look almost identical, save the prisons don't allow you to leave.
The short version is that a naive comparison shows that recidivism in Norway is much lower than in the US, a more thorough comparison shows that recidivism is actually not so different. But either way, making prisons worse doesn't actually help fighting crime. So the decision whether prisoners should be treated humanely or not is more about ideology than effectiveness.
And personally I think humans should be treated humanely, no matter what they did.
I don't know, the American prison system doesn't seem to consider that a high importance. The problem in Japan seems to be that the not-even-actually-nice prison system still trumps the conditions under which those pensioners apparently live.
If your prison system is not a complete nightmare and people seem to be intentionally getting themselves imprisoned the right solution isn't to make the prisons worse, it's to fix the social problems that are making people prefer going to prison (i.e. in this case: loneliness, societal neglect, poverty and shame).
I'm not here to defend the American prison system - I'm talking more generally.
> f your prison system is not a complete nightmare and people seem to be intentionally getting themselves imprisoned the right solution isn't to make the prisons worse, it's to fix the social problems that are making people prefer going to prison (i.e. in this case: loneliness, societal neglect, poverty and shame).
Obviously that's the ideal, but it's literally impossible. How is the government (or whichever organisation) going to solve all its citizens' personal problems? If we lived in a world where all people's personal problems were taken care of, prisons would be barely needed.
Money ?
If we are still talking about poverty, loneliness, etc, then the solution is to build old people's homes. As a lot of countries do, so it's clearly not impossible. The residents pay a percentage of their pension and/or fortune, if you're poor you pay little, of you're well off you pay more. But everyone can get a place to live.
The specific problem in Japan as described in the article is that the basic state pension is too low to live off. And with no alternatives you end up as Toshio. The retirement age is also very low in Japan, which doesn't help - you're supposed to live off your pension from you're 60 or even younger. That'll be several decades of very poor economy for a lot of old people.