Criminal Justice: Does America have harsher prison sentences for the same crimes as Japan does? by Stephen McInerney

Answer by Stephen McInerney:

TL;DR version: Yes. Emphatically so.

At first I couldn't immediately find direct comparison US-Japan sentencing data on a per-category of crime, but the numerical evidence is overwhelming (later on I found ):

– in 2009 Japan's entire prison population was 75,250. For the entire country. By US standards you might as well call that zero. For cultural reasons why Japan's is low, see [1]. (This stat already answers your question, unless we hypothesize that Japanese detection, arrest, prosecution and conviction rates are wack.)
In fact, just the US juvenile prison population alone exceeds Japan's entire.

– Complete US prison population data from BJS for all years and broken out by demographic, type of prison and state are here [2]

– NYTimes ''Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’' [3]:

Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say  they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American  prison sentences.
Prison sentences here have become “vastly harsher than in any other  country to which the United States would ordinarily be compared,”  Michael H. Tonry, a leading authority on crime policy, wrote in “The  Handbook of Crime and Punishment.”
Indeed, said Vivien Stern, a  research fellow at the prison studies center in London, the American  incarceration rate has made the United States “a rogue state, a country  that has made a decision not to follow what is a normal Western  approach.”

Now, as to apples-to-apples comparative sentencing data (doesn't reference Japan directly):

– Gottschalk [4] reports: Life sentences have become so commonplace that about one out of eleven  people imprisoned in the United States is serving one (nearly one-third  of those is LWOP).

One prominent researcher is Amanda Solter of USF, who released a 2012 report “Cruel and Unusual: U.S. Sentencing Practices in a Global Context” [5]

[5b] press release 'U.S. Sentencing Laws Out of Step with the Rest of the World… the report compiles comparative research on sentencing laws around the  globe and documents how sentencing laws distinguish the United States  from other countries. Researchers found that the United States is in the  minority of countries using several sentencing practices, such as life  without parole, consecutive sentences, juvenile life without parole,  juvenile transfer to adult courts, and successive prosecution of the  same defendant by the state and federal government.
Conversely, sentencing practices promulgated under international law and used around  the world, such as setting 12 as the minimum age of criminal liability  and retroactive application of sentencing laws that benefit offenders ('retroactive ameliorative'),  are not systematically applied in the United States. Mandatory minimum  sentences for crimes and “three strikes” laws are used in the U.S. more  widely than elsewhere in the world.
“It has long been understood that that U.S. sentences are much longer  than those used in many other countries around the world. Our study  comprehensively compiles the available statutory evidence for that  assertion,” said Professor Connie de la Vega, Professor and Academic  Director of International Programs at the University of San Francisco  School of Law, and one of the authors of the report.

– Fleischer [6] quotes it:

“There’s a reason we have the incredible prison population that we do, and  it’s not because of higher crime,” says Amanda Solter, one of the  report’s authors who spent nearly two years studying international  sentencing laws. “It’s because of our sentencing policies—the majority  of which were implemented the last 30 years.”

– Fleischer [6] Cruel and Unusual: U.S. Sentencing Practices Vs. Everybody Else is a good concise overview of Solter's research:

The U.S. is also part of the minority group of countries—21 percent of the world’s nations-–that  allow “uncapped” consecutive sentencing like the kind that put Daniel  Vilca in prison for 154 years multiple counts of the same non-violent  crime. The vast majority of countries around the world allow for  enhanced sentencing for multiple counts of the same offense, but within  limits—with “capped” maximum sentences. In Switzerland, for example,  Vilca would have received the maximum sentence allowed for one count of  possession of child porn, and then had his sentence bumped by 50 percent  for the additional counts.

Perhaps most interesting is how the U.S. deals with retroactive application of ameliorative law—meaning  how prisoner sentences are dealt with when legislators revise the  sentencing guidelines. Unlike 66 percent of the world, the U.S. has no  law that guarantees prisoners the right to ameliorative relief once  they’ve been convicted.
…
'What does the U.S. have in common with South Sudan and Somalia?'
They're the only three countries in the world that haven't ratified  the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.  Solter et al find that overlong sentences and prosecution of children are  two ways the U.S. is out of step with most of the rest of the world.

There’s plenty gone haywire in our sentencing laws, but  a big part of the problem is that the U.S. is categorically alone in  its propensity to lock up children. According to the report, there are  an estimated 2,594 juveniles offenders serving life without parole  sentences in the U.S. and zero in the rest of the world. “Argentina is  one of the few countries aside from the U.S. whose law allows for such  sentences,” explains Solter, “they just don’t actually sentence anyone.  And if they did, the sentence would be overturned in court.”

– Emma Chen [8] has numbers on ageing criminal populations and recidivism in US vs Japan.

and once you find where to look, it goes on and on. I'm stopping now.

[1] 'Crime and Punishment in Japan: From Re-integrative Shaming to Popular Punitivism' – Ellis, Hamai
[2] http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.c…
[3] NYT 'Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’
[4] Days Without End: Life Sentences and Penal Reform – Marie Gottschalk, Prison Legal News
[5] “Cruel and Unusual: U.S. Sentencing Practices in a Global Context” Report
[5b] USF Press Release
[6] Cruel and Unusual: U.S. Sentencing Practices Vs. Everybody Else by Matthew Fleischer
[7] http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/in…
[8] 'Angry Gran: Mobile Game or Demographic Game-Change?'

Criminal Justice: Does America have harsher prison sentences for the same crimes as Japan does?