Summary Of The White Paper On Crime

Summary of the White Paper on Crime

Linking Community and Corrections in Japan

COMPLETING ELMER H. JOHNSON'S impressive three-volume examination of corrections in Japan, Linking Community and Corrections in Japan (written with the assistance of Carol H. Johnson) focuses on the Rehabilitation Bureau's responsibilities regarding probation, parole, and aftercare as well as the Correction Bureau's role in Japan's version of community-oriented corrections. In Linking Community and Corrections in Japan, Johnson first outlines the tasks of the Rehabilitation Bureau, then turns to historic and contemporary views of community and corrections. In discussions of the probation and parole system for both adults and juveniles, he describes in detail the Japanese version of supervision and the return of prisoners to the community. One strength of this study is Johnson's impartiality. As an investigator, he functions as a "friend of the court", an adviser who is free to conduct an objective pursuit of the fundamental strengths and shortcomings of the Japanese prison system. He also follows the Foucauldian dictum: "With the prisons there would be no sense of limiting oneself to discourses about prisons; just as important are the discourses which arise within the prison, the decisions and regulations which are among its constituent elements, its means of functioning, along with its strategies". Johnson provides sixty tables, two charts, and nineteen black-and-white illustrations.

Criminalization and Prisoners in Japan

In his second book to deal with Japanese corrections, Elmer H. Johnson explores the cultural heritage and structure of the criminal justice administration that underlies Japan's reluctance to use imprisonment, which he first examined in Japanese Corrections: Managing Convicted Offenders in an Orderly Society. Here Johnson introduces the concept of criminalization, its implications, and its two versions that differentiate four of the six cohorts who have entered prison in increasing numbers in recent decades: yakuza (Japanese mafia), adult traffic offenders, women drug offenders, and juvenile drug and traffic offenders. Foreigners and elderly inmates, the other two cohorts, elude criminalization as groups but also have become prisoners in greater numbers for other reasons.