Is Japan Better at Running Prisons Than America?

redstate.com

America's prison systems are a mess. Too many of our nation's prisons, at the state and federal levels, are overcrowded. The inmates, it seems, often don't have enough to do, and the old saying about idle hands being the devil's workshop comes into play. Our prisons are hotbeds for violence, and all too often, younger inmates get a crash course from the older ones on how to be better, more effective crooks when their term in the crowbars is over.

Could we learn a thing or two from Japan? Japan has roughly the same percentage of its population incarcerated as we do. But they seem to be better at running a prison system.

A recent City Journal piece has some interesting points to make. But I think they miss one or two key things about Japan.

America’s federal prisons are decaying and overcrowded, contributing to violence among inmates and undermining opportunities for rehabilitation. But thanks to an infusion of federal cash authorized by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the Bureau of Prisons has a chance to clean things up. As the BOP weighs those and other reforms, it should look to Japan, where prisons are spacious, efficient, and largely disorder-free.
Federal prisons are currently about 10 percent over capacity. At BOP’s high-security lockups, the figure is 23 percent. Overcrowded prisons are prone to disorder, including prison riots, violence, and sexual assaults. Indeed, between 2020 and 2023, American federal prisons reported nearly 5,000 sexual assaults on inmates.

These are intolerable numbers, and while one of the obvious answers is to "build bigger, newer prisons" as well as refurbishing some old ones (Alcatraz), should that prove feasible, we still have more to fix than that. And, yes, Japan is doing better in all of these metrics:

Japanese prisons, by contrast, operated at 47 percent of capacity in 2023. Their facilities, not coincidently, haven’t seen riots or wide-scale disorder in decades, and they report far fewer assaults on inmates. The country recorded only 25 assaults on inmates, no attacks on corrections officers, and one escape across its entire prison system between 2017 and 2021—remarkable figures, given that Japan’s prisons incarcerated 42,000 inmates in 2022. U.S. federal prisons, by contrast, recorded more than 3,000 “less serious assaults” against inmates in 2024 alone, in a system with nearly 158,000 detainees.

A lot of Japan's solution involves keeping its inmates busy. We used to do that - work farms, chain gangs, and the like. Just having inmates grow a portion of their own food would not only keep them busy (and tired) but would also provide them with some useful skills, besides crime. And sure, make them work, even if that work is just stamping out license plates or building more of those classic gunmetal-gray government desks and chairs. That practice has largely ended, but there's no reason we couldn't bring it back.

Japan significantly curtailed prison violence with two key strategies. First, it built more prisons to reduce crowding. Many Japanese prisons house inmates in individual cells, which reduces tensions among and limits the number of contacts between prisoners. The overcrowding in many American federal prisons negatively affects inmates’ mental health, which can lead to violence.
Second, Japan enforces strict, work-centric schedules for inmates, at all security levels. After breakfast and with a few breaks, Japanese prisoners work from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

So it's working, for Japan.

President Trump's Alcatraz Proposal Is Exactly What We Need, and What San Francisco Deserves

But there's another matter, a cultural issue, that is almost certainly in play here. Japan is quite unlike the United States. It's a very civilized country inhabited by a very civilized people, but the nature of their civilization is different than ours. While Japan is a high-trust society, it's also a society that is much more accepting of authority than we notoriously independent-minded, fractious Americans. Japan is also - and this is significant - a culturally and ethnically homogenous society. Japan is overwhelmingly populated with Japanese, and while that is changing somewhat in recent years, immigration into Japan is still tightly controlled. Japan's population is headed for a decline; younger Japanese people just aren't having enough babies. But Japan seems to have decided to go down Japanese.

Are those cultural and ethnic issues enough to make a difference even in their prison population? I suspect they might. And, before we start any wholesale application of Japanese systems on our various correction facilities, that's something that warrants some consideration. Although making inmates work, yes, it's hard to see a downside to that. Make them grow some calluses. Make them sweat. And make them earn at least a part of their keep.

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