Date of Publication: Spring 2019
Articles:
Bunji Sawanobori, Solitary Confinement in Japan: Incarceration within Incarceration and Global Standards
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Introduction: Japan is a unitary state where the prison system is under the jurisdiction of a single national ministry. The Ministry of Justice is the only governmental authority in Japan regulating the country’s 76 prisons, which include 6 juvenile prisons and 8 detention houses.
In this article, I would like to address recent changes in Japanese corrections, which started in late 2002. The changes were brought about after incidents involving death and injury to prisoners in Nagoya Prison, which were caused by eight corrections officers. This work evaluates these changes from the perspective of international standards. Although the basic human rights of prisoners are now guaranteed by Article 1 of the new Japanese Act on Penal Detention Facilities and Treatment of Inmates and Detainees, there is no attempt to clearly define or even describe the day-to-day matters to be regulated in the legislation itself. Most such matters are probably somewhat difficult to define or describe from the outset, which is why subordinate legislation–the rules and regulations written by the ministerial bureaucracy– has even more importance than the new statute itself. The rules and regulations that control prisoners’ daily lives can actually violate their human rights, as shown by examples later in this article.
John O. Haley, Punish or Prevent: The Night and Day of Criminal Justice
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Introduction: Imagine two productive and prosperous industrial democracies: One tends to criminalize nearly all behavior deemed socially inappropriate. It has thus created thousands of statutory and regulatory crimes. Compared to other industrial democracies, it has one of the highest rates of violent crime, particularly homicide. Throughout the society fear of crime remains rampant. Its citizens spend millions of dollars to secure their homes. In suburbs, gated communities have become the norm. More millions of dollars are spent on security guards for malls, schools, public facilities, and even hospitals. Parents do not permit their children to walk alone, even in their own neighborhoods. Few even venture into some urban neighborhoods in day or night. Thousands of well-armed police work in thousands of disparate jurisdictions. They patrol in bullet-proof cars and seldom, if ever, walk the streets. All exercise individual discretion with limited or no guidance or supervision. Their role is more to apprehend criminals than to prevent crime and they are rewarded more for the numbers they arrest than those they secure. This society also has more prosecutors and trial judges, whose courts are more clogged with criminal cases than almost any other. These law-enforcing authorities also exercise rarely supervised, individual discretion and are rewarded for the guilty pleas they garner and the punishments they inflict. It is a society that rejects corporeal punishment as “barbaric” and severely limits resort to the death penalty as “uncivilized” and yet, without any evidentiary hearing on guilt, hundreds of its citizens are consigned daily to jails or prisons where criminal gangs are in control and incidents of violence, rape, and death are notoriously endemic. It arrests and holds in local jails, without trial or even meaningful interrogation, thousands of persons for days and often months. It also imprisons millions more and has created the world’s largest and most costly prison system, which has become a major public and private industry that employs thousands at taxpayer expense. Most inmates will spend their lives in and out of the prisons that for them have become the schools of crime. Surely this is the Night of criminal justice–the United States of America.
Erica Duff, Reproduction As A Site of Punishment: Shackling Pregnant Women During Labor and Delivery in Modern American Prisons
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Introduction: Using restraints on incarcerated pregnant women during labor and delivery sounds like a barbaric practice from the Middle Ages, yet this practice, known as shackling, is widespread in American prisons. The number of women in prison in the United States has dramatically increased over the past three decades. Since 2000, the number of incarcerated women has risen 30%, while the male prison population increased by only 13%. As the population of female inmates grows, so does the number of pregnant women in prison. Approximately, 6-10% of women are pregnant when they enter the prison system. This increase in incarcerated women occurs along racial lines. In 2014, the rate of imprisonment of black women was twice that of white women. The overrepresentation of black women in the criminal justice system is frequently overlooked, posing a challenge for that population. The racialization of incarceration means that black women are disproportionately exposed to the brutal practice of shackling.
Ephraim Heiliczer, Dying Criminal Laws: Sodomy and Adultery from the Bible to Demise
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Introduction: A distinguishing feature of present day Western criminal law is the demise of the established crimes of sodomy and adultery. What made sodomy and adultery important capital crimes in previous generations? What caused them to lose their significance leading to their decriminalization in present day Western criminal law? How did the demise of sodomy and adultery correlate with the rise of criminal sexual assault and the quasi-criminal sexual harassment? These are the significant questions that this article will explore.