DEVELOPMENT-JAPAN: Gov’t Seeks Harsher Penalties for Young Criminals

By Suvendrini Kakuchi Reprint | | Print |

Suvendrini Kakuchi

TOKYO, Sep 15 2000 (IPS) - A spate of juvenile crimes over the past two years has prompted Japan’s government to propose a new bill that would lower the criminal punishment age from 16 years to 14 years old.

Prompted by the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), two other parties in Japan’s ruling coalition agreed to the amendment last week. This, legal experts contend, would make the bill pass the Diet, which is currently in session, by the end of this year.

The coalition’s decision was a bid to toughen the current juvenile deliquency law in order to stem the rising numbers of young criminals, LDP secretary general Hiromu Nonaka says.

He points out that the spate of felonies appears to indicate a growing cruelty among young people. The new bill, he explains, hopes to instill fear in the youth and also make sure that those found guilty will have to take responsibility for their actions.

But activists and lawyers who oppose the bill say sending people to jail at a younger age would not solve the real roots of violent crimes by youth offenders. In fact, they say that the amendment’s passage would have disastrous effects on youth reform.

“Nothing can be solved by sending children to prison with adult offenders,” says Masuto Hirayu, a lawyer who has appeared for both offenders and victims in juvenile crime cases.

He explains that children who commit crime need time to reform, but sending them to prison means denying them that opportunity to rehabilitate themselves.

“The offender is held in a prison because he needs to be locked up to protect society. A reform school, on the other hand, is for the purpose of rehabilitating the child so that he can go back to society,” he adds.

The Jusice Ministry has reported that while the number of juveniles sent to prosecutors in 1999 was 279,774 — a decline of 6.3 percent from the previous year — the number of suspects in violent crimes has been rising steadily.

The number of juveniles sent to public prosecutors on suspicion of murder or attempted murder exceeded 200 during the first half of this year, almost double that during the same period of 1999, according to the ministry report.

The figures of criminal offenses including murder, causing serious injuries, and robbery, have been increasing steadily since 1994, during which 122 minors were arrested for murder.

Total arrests peaked at 1,135 in 1998. In 2000, there were 1,963 arrests for the first six months alone.

Current laws covering juvenile crime stipulate that suspects below the age of 16 years be tried at family courts and those found guilty sent to reform schools.

At these reform schools, youth offenders are offered counselling and continue to take school lessons while held in the reformatory during their sentences that are usually up to six years.

Family courts have the authority to send minors aged 16 or older back to prosecutors for indictment at a district court.

But the current system is under fire these days. Victims of brutal crimes have also been calling for longer sentences and stiffer penalties, arguing that the criminals are getting off lightly.

“Today’s youth are viewed as dangerous,” writes Yuko Kawanishi, who teaches sociology at Temple University.

She describes as “chilling message” to the public the murder three months ago of a 65-year-old woman by a young man, who later told police he did it to find out what that experience would be like.

In a case that illustrates the public perception that young criminals are getting off the hook, the victims of a recent bus hijacking by a 17-year-old boy expressed anger and bewilderment after they were offered an out-of-court settlement and financial compensation by the suspect’s parents.

The teenager from Sega prefecture in southern Japan had held 26 passengers hostage, and slashed an old woman to death during the six-hour ordeal. He is now in a reform institution.

Amid growing calls for harsher sentences, prosecutors have also begun to demand that young offenders arrested for murder be tried as adults.

Last week, public prosecutors demanded that the Hiroshima High Court overturn a lower court ruling that sentenced a 19-year-old male to death for the murder of a woman and her 11-month old daughter last year.

The lower courts had ordered the defendant, who was 18 years old when he committed the crime, sent to a reformatory in view of his troubled family background and mental instability.

The husband of the murder victim wants the youth to be hanged, arguing that the offender has shown no remorse.

In another incident, prosecutors asked that a 17-year-old boy arrested in June on suspicion of beating his four baseball teammates with a bat and killing his mother be tried in district courts.

Prosecutors argued that the killing was premeditated. But the judge ordered the case to be heard in the family courts, saying the boy should undergo rehabilitation rather than take on criminal responsibility.

The judge said he based his decision on the fact that the boy said he had murdered his mother to spare her from the anguish she would have felt because he thought he had beaten one of the teammates to death.

Professor Akira Sugihara, who counsels juvenile criminals, opposes the new bill lowering the age at which youngsters can be sent to prison. He says young criminals are often victims themselves, and must be treated differently from adults.

“Violent television programmes, for example, affect innocent children and lead them to commit crime,” Sugihara said, pointing out to several murder cases where suspects told police they beat their peers or adults to imitate television programmes.

In addition, he says some Japanese parents force their children into situations where violence occurs as a means of letting off their frustration.

He explains that many children in reformatories have said that their parents do not understand them and that they had no one to listen to their problems. This, Sugihara says, paints how loneliness and frustration have led them to commit crimes.

Moreover, Hirayu says, children sent to prison will have a hard time rejoining mainstream society because they would be discriminated against.

“Japanese society is harsh when it comes to accepting offenders, especially if they carry the stigma of having a prison record. This makes it more the reason why they could resort to crime again,” he explains.

Surveys on public support for the death penalty during the past year show that more than 50 percent of Japanese support harsher sentences for murder and serious crimes.