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?
