At Fukuoka Prison, eight inmates roll out their futon mattresses each night, covering every inch of floor in a cell designed for seven.
"There's no extra space for them to sit or walk," said Junichi Maeda, an official at Japan's sixth-largest prison, whose 1,700 shaved-headed male convicts range from thieves to Yakuza crime-gang members. "They have to step over each other to get to the bathroom."
Fukuoka Prison is already filled to 110 percent capacity and can't expand fast enough to house an influx of new inmates, Maeda said. Japan's prison population has swelled 54 percent in the past decade to 67,700 in July of this year, and the government expects the number to reach 80,000 as soon as 2005.
The increase is one by-product of a decade-long economic decline that's helped push the nation's crime rate to a record high. It shows that stalled growth isn't just stoking unemployment, bankruptcies and government debt -- and that Japan is losing its place as one of the world's safest, most law-abiding societies.
"Japan used to be so safe and peaceful," said Wataru Ueno, an official at Kagino Kyukyusha, a Fukuoka-based company that sells pick-proof door locks. "Not anymore." Demand for the company's locks is rising, he said, without giving details.
Rising crime is also boosting sales of burglar alarms and surveillance equipment. That helped Sohgo Security Services Co., Japan's No. 2 security company, raise ?40.2 billion (US$323.2 million) on Tuesday in Japan's second-biggest initial stock offer this year.
Japan's economy probably won't grow at all in the year ending March 31, according to the government. Unemployment is at 5.4 percent, near a record high, and wages fell in July at the fastest pace in 12 years. Shrinking tax revenue and growing national debt leave little room to expand welfare programs.
That's driving more Japanese to crime, analysts say. The number of reported crimes nationwide in the first half of 2002 rose to a record 1.35 million, according to the National Police Agency.
"Crime is rising because Japan's economy can't get out of a prolonged recession," said Yoshimi Watanabe, a lawmaker in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. "People are feeling very insecure -- the ties that bind Japanese society have loosened." A spate of sensational violent crimes in recent years has heightened the public's sense of insecurity.
Last year, a 37-year old man stabbed eight children to death and injured 15 other people, including teachers, at an elementary school in the city of Ikeda, near Osaka.
Shoplifting, pickpocketing and other unarmed theft rose 9.1 percent in the first half of 2002 from a year earlier to 230,000, according to police figures.
"Behind the rising crime rate is a complex set of factors such as rising unemployment and low economic growth," said Nobuo Komiya, a criminology professor at Tokyo-based Rissho University.
"Japan is no longer a safe country." That said, Japan's crime rate and prison population still pale in comparison to those in the US and some European nations.
There were about 1,985 crimes reported for every 100,000 Japanese people in 2000, compared with 4,124 in the US and 6,446 in France, according to Interpol statistics. Violent crime is even less common in Japan: Its homicide rate was just 1.1, compared with 5.5 in the US and 3.7 in France.
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