In America we have lots of PLANS to reduce crime, but with a failure to execute. An examination of Capital Punishment in Japan, today on The Tenth Man
Introduction
A murderer was executed in Alabama ending his long inhumane wait on death row. Capital Punishment is again under discussion, making it a good time to discuss violent crime rates in the US, versus rates in the Far East. Japan is often held up as an example for the US to follow in order to reduce crime here. The Gun Law Obsessed – people who can only keep a single thought in their heads at one time – point to the rate of gun ownership as if it’s the single distinction between our countries. That’s absurd of course. Guns don’t cause crime, but, more crime leads to more gun ownership, and there are dozens of CULTURAL factors distinguishing our countries. The major difference between us is crime and punishment, including Capital Punishment.
Silliness
America bashers love to find a single factor and say “here is the reason the Japanese live longer. They eat fish.” Well they also eat whale meat and carp jizz but somehow those delicacies are not being promoted here in the US. Everybody has his ax to grind, but sociologists know (the old white guys at least) that societies are complex.
Kidding aside, all sociologists know this, not just the old white guys, but most are either dishonest or afraid to say so, therefore it’s up to us to put the pieces together.
Topic
Japanese society is very different from ours, and in general they are more conformist. Tattoos for example are forbidden and used to be illegal.
There’s no “police brutality” movement in Japan – your neighbors are more likely to turn you in and cheer for the police than to take videos of your arrest and protest on Instagram. When there’s an arrest, there’s no mob of relatives with a high-profile lawyer and preacher demanding your civil rights. The entire family is shamed. Those are just a few examples.
Then there’s capital punishment.
The Gun Law Obsessed are experts at stacking statistics. As our grandfathers used to say “there are lies, there are damn lies, then there are statistics”. (Truth be told my grandfathers never used such language and I avoid it myself.)
The media report “the homicide rate in the US is around 6 deaths per hundred thousand, in Japan it’s only 0.25 per hundred thousand. For people who only understand sixth grade math, they can impressively state that our murder rate is twenty times as high as Japan’s. Even leaving out the fact that most of our murders have underlying factors like drugs – which are illegal in Japan, even marijuana – we’re still talking about murder’s being rare here, versus very rare in Japan. Like your odds of being struck by lightning versus bitten by a shark, it’s still rare.
So let’s use some real numbers to show that one big reason for Japan’s low murder rate is capital punishment as bad as it is.
In Japan, ninety-nine percent of the people arrested are convicted. You may remember the case of Carlos Ghosn, the CEO of Nissan Automobiles who fled Japan after being arrested. He shone a light on their legal system. In Japan the police can arrest you and detain you for more than three weeks without charging you. Twenty-three days. Ghosn claimed that they first held him for the maximum time, then released him with the intention of arresting him on a different charge, then repeating again and again. This they do until they get a confession.
By comparison - President Bukele, the new law and order president of El Salvador, was criticized globally when he started rounding up the drug cartels and giving the police fifteen days to arraign them. The United Nations was outraged when in Japan three weeks has been normal for years.
The Japanese police extract confessions in most cases, and the 99 percent convicted go to prison. Once in prison every minute of their day is regulated. They have thirty minutes of exercise. They wear uniforms, and they march to work making shoes or soap. They keep silence except during breaks and free time, and all conversations, TV, and books must be in Japanese. And once a year there is a picnic outside the prison where the citizens come to eat, play games, get face paint, and celebrate their safe country. The Japanese culture loves its police and prisons. Attitudes are everything and the attitudes in Japan are different, but what about capital punishment?
First of all, capital punishment in Japan is subject to appeal. Not like the US where appeal is to reduce the penalty. No. You see in Japan the judges are evaluated based on how many cases they can clear in a year and sometimes a case is rushed through and justice is not served. In those cases the prosecutor can appeal to INCREASE the penalty to capital punishment.
We’ll get to the numbers that count in just a minute but right now, please take a minute to hit Like and subscribe. This is pretty good stuff, right?
Next there’s the method of execution. How much time in the news cycle is wasted discussing the method? The hypocrisy is that capital punishment is the only topic where we discuss the humanity of the punishment and we could spend some time on that. All criminal sentences are punishment and a deprivation of rights.
It doesn’t matter very much how you execute someone, but if it did; The fact is, man has known how to humanely execute condemned criminals since William Marwood of England perfected the long drop method of hanging in 1872. He eliminated botched executions using mathematics and produced tables for others to use. The relevance here being that hanging is what they use in Japan.
Then there’s the timing and schedule. Here in the US prisoners are given thirty days’ notice of their execution so that all the do-gooders can protest outside the prison and get on TV. In Japan however, the condemned man is not told until the very day of execution, sometimes only an hour ahead. His family is notified of the event only after it’s over.
Those are some intriguing facts but let’s talk about the numbers. All of these discussions are numbers games and you have to think about why they choose the numbers they do. The number of murders per hundred thousand? Does a potential killer give any thought to the nation’s murder rate? Those numbers are an attempt to blame society instead of blaming the criminal. The man who is intent to kill will do so. What is to stop him?
Here's what will stop him: This number.
In the US in 2022 there were twenty-six thousand murders and eighteen executions.
In Japan there were three hundred murders and fifteen executions.
Japan had about the same number of executions for three hundred murders as we had for twenty six thousand murders. That’s eighty-seven times as many murders. Eighty-seven times.
The politicians are telling us we have “twenty times as many murders per capita” when they should be telling us we only have one ninetieth as many murderers being punished in the US as in Japan. Japan is way ahead on justice.
Topic
Anybody can do this math, but nobody does. If you are hearing this for the first time, then every criminal in Japan knows something you don’t. He knows he’s almost ninety times as likely to be executed for murder in Japan, as he would be in the U.S.
The criminal mind is not complicated and neither is crime and punishment. Capital punishment is horrible but murder is worse. Society needs to hate crime more than it hates punishment. That’s formula is working in Japan.
