Death Penalty News

An amendment to the Penal Code placing greater emphasis on rehabilitation efforts in prison took effect Sunday, marking the first time changes have been made to the forms of punishment under Japan's more than a century-old crime laws. Imprisonment is no longer divided into the categories of with and without labor, and prison work is no longer mandatory for inmates, allowing more time to be allocated for rehabilitative guidance and education to reduce recidivism, according to the Justice Ministry. The revised law, which will affect people convicted from Sunday, stipulates anew that imprisonment consists of "confinement in a penal institution" and that inmates can be assigned to undertake "necessary work" or can undergo "necessary guidance" for rehabilitation and improvement.

Stephen Oliphant’s recent study on the death penalty’s effect on homicide rates published in Criminology & Public Policy found “no evidence of a deterrent effect attributable to death penalty statutes.”  Oliphant first discusses deterrence theory, which “posits that punishment, or the threat of punishment, discourages individuals from committing crime,” and its role in capital punishment discourse, where proponents of the death penalty have argued that the threat of the death penalty discourages homicide, and that abolition (or a halt to the use of the death penalty) would lead to increased murder rates. The research focused on four states which imposed moratoria on the death penalty—Illinois, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Washington—and examined the homicide rates in each state in the years preceding and following the state’s institution of a death penalty moratorium. 

Japan is one step closer to amending its Penal Code in order to emphasize rehabilitation programs aimed at giving inmates a better chance of reintegrating into society. Punishments under the current Penal Code are aimed at preventing recidivism and, in essence, have long been interpreted as a form of retribution. But in recent years, the concept of rehabilitation has begun to win ground over punishment. On Tuesday, the government approved a Cabinet decision on a draft amendment to the Penal Code and related laws on imprisonment. Currently, the principal punishments in the nation's justice system are the death penalty, imprisonment with work, imprisonment without work, a fine, and a sentence that includes both imprisonment and a fine. Punishments involving imprisonment with or without work are supposed to reflect the seriousness of the violation, but the proposed bill will integrate the 2 categories. The bill is scheduled to be submitted to the current session of parliament. If appr...

Psychiatrist Christine Montross has spent years treating people with serious mental illnesses — sometimes in hospitals, other times in jails or prisons. "The patients that I was seeing in my hospital were indistinguishable many times from the men and women that I was evaluating in jail," Montross says. "But the environments were so markedly different. One [is] charged with ... trying to help and heal, and the other [is] really designed to control and punish." Montross is a 2015 Guggenheim fellow and an associate professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University's medical school. In her new book, Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration , she writes that in the U.S., people with serious mental illnesses are far more likely to be incarcerated than they are to be treated in a psychiatric hospital — despite the fact that incarceration often makes mentally ill people worse. "People who are mentally ill to begin with ...

In 2016, together with former colleague Assistant Federal Public Defender Donnie W. Bethel, I wrote, “[p]eople of all persuasions, political parties, and philosophies have awakened to the terrible toll the crises of overcriminalization and mass incarceration have wrought on America.” Then, a year later, highlighting the “criminalization of addiction,” I wrote about Benny King – one of Bethel’s clients – a gregarious, good-hearted, God-fearing 53-year-old black man incarcerated for 14 months at the federal correctional institution in Jesup, Georgia, for violating conditions of his supervised release; reprinting Bethel’s arguments I demonstrated (just as Bethel had) how King’s conduct in a nonviolent, low-level federal criminal case bore no relation to his incarceration other than the fact that, it too, like the entirety of King’s nonviolent criminal history, was a byproduct of decades-long untreated drug addiction. Now, in 2019, as if time were standing still despite the “awa...

What is the point of sending someone to prison - retribution or rehabilitation? Twenty years ago, Norway moved away from a punitive "lock-up" approach and sharply cut reoffending rates. The BBC's Emma Jane Kirby went to see the system in action, and to meet prison officers trained to serve as mentors and role models for prisoners.

When compared with many other countries, Switzerland tends to hand down shorter sentences, particularly for violent crime. And usually only repeat offenders or serious criminals have to do prison time. Why? Closer inspection of the penal codes of European countries shows that German-speaking countries, including Switzerland, issue relatively lenient criminal sentences.  Anyone who kills a person in Switzerland while suffering “great mental distress” could, under certain circumstances, get just one year in prison. In Switzerland, a life sentence can be given for murder, but under Swiss criminal law “life” doesn’t mean that the perpetrator remains in prison for the rest of their days. RELATED | What does “life” mean in Swiss criminal law? After 15 years, sometimes after just 10 years, a conditional release is possible. It is generally the norm in Switzerland that a criminal is conditionally released after serving two-thirds of their sentence. Lenient judges...

Execution seems to some an effective measure to make society safer because it prevents recidivism by serious offenders, but a lawyer, who wished to only be identified by his surname, Huang, said it is "absurd" to argue for the retention of the death penalty for that reason. It is absurd to have criminals killed by the state for any crime because it is tantamount to letting the state "take lives of its citizens to make up for what it is duty-bound, but has failed, to deliver," Huang said. Huang said he is leaning toward taking a position against the death penalty because Judge Regis de Jorna of the Paris Court of Assises has enlightened him about whether the sentence is an effective deterrent against crime. He had attended a forum entitled "Why the EU moved away from the Death Penalty" in Taipei on Oct. 15, where De Jorna made his point by drawing on a speech that then-French justice minister Robert Badinter delivered to the National Assembly...