Japan's Prison System

Abstract

FOR sixty years Japan has been going to school to the Western World. In nothing is this more apparent than in her prison system. Under the leaders-hip of her great Meiji Emperor and his advisers commission after commission was sent to Europe and America to study western ways of doing things. They came back and the government put into operation what they had learned. The prison law is dated the z7th day of the third month of the 4ISt year of Meiji. Japan has followed the English system rather than the American, although certain features of the American system have been adopted. In the Japanese system there are four kinds of prisons: (i) The prison forpenal servitude; (z) the prison for imprisonment; (3) the of detention; and (4) the prison for confinement. The first is for those who under the law are sentenced to penal servitude, much as in the English system. The second is for those guilty of less serious offenses who are sentenced to imprisonment. The third is for still less serious offenders who are sentenced under the law to detention. The fourth is intended for the confinement of accused persons awaiting trial, and for those under sentence of death. Also in the fourth may be confined temporarily those sentenced to any of the first three kinds of prisons. In a house of custody attached to a police station persons sentenced to penal servitude or imprisonment may not be kept more than a month. For youthful offenders under eighteen years of age special institutions are provided, if they have been sentenced to penal servitude for two months or more, or in case such special institutions have not yet been built, they must be confined in a special part of another prison carefully separated from older criminals. In such institutions or special departments they may be kept until they are twenty years old, or for the remainder of their sentences, if the sentences expire only three months after they have arrived at the age of twenty. Exceptions to the application of this rule may be made in case it seems necessary to do so, having regard to the state, or the mental and physical development of the In every prison there must be provision for the separate confinement of male and female offenders. Moreover, in case that one of each of the four classes of prisons is located in the same precinct, they must be separate institutions. Visitation of the prisons must be provided by the Minister of Justice. Judges and public procurators, or what we