Grey crimewave puts pressure on courts, jails

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Arrests of pensioners are soaring as an influx of elderly inmates creates new problems for prisons.

It is being dubbed the "grey crimewave" or the rise of the "Saga lout".

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 trend is the result of people on low pensions turning to crime through necessity, or simply a tougher attitude by the courts to the elderly in the dock.

While the number of crimes committed by the over-65 age group remains low as a percentage of all crime, the new statistics supplied by police show rises of between 15 per cent and 25 per cent in arrests of pensioners.

In Derbyshire, for example, 260 over-65s were arrested for serious crimes last year, compared with 88 in 2008.

In Scotland the numbers of over-65s charged with drug and weapon crimes more than doubled in four years - from 36 in 2005 to 80 last year. Crimes of senior-citizen indecency leapt 50 per cent in 5217 crimes committed last year by Scottish pensioners.

Welsh forces report a similar rise in aged criminals: they arrested 494 last year, 69 for sex offences and 65 for theft.

Bill Tupman, a criminologist at Exeter University, believes there is now a far harsher attitude towards the elderly from police and courts. "The trend is definitely on the up, in contrast to what you'd expect with overall crime going down," he said. Changes in the law meant that police and courts were now "less likely to take pity on poor old grandad in the dock".

"Now, with financial crime, the money and assets can be recovered, so we are far less likely to go easy on the elderly when we can take their cash and their car if we get a conviction," he said.

Over-60s are now the fastest-growing section of the prison population. There are almost 2500 people in this age group in British prisons, making up 3 per cent of the total, up from 2 per cent in 2003.

Kingston prison in Portsmouth has become the first in the country to provide a special "elderly wing" with stairlifts and other adaptations.

But Harry Fletcher of Napo, the probation officers' union, said the most significant worry was that elderly inmates were last in the queue for support at a time of crippling cutbacks.

In the Netherlands the same steep rise in offending pensioners has been monitored and Japan, France and Israel have all commissioned research into the rise of the pensioner-criminal.

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