Japanese Prisons Are Overflowing With Foreign Criminals!

This afternoon’s RealTime News program had a special report on growing number of foreigners in Japanese prisons, which is apparently a new problem for Japan. They sent a team to Tokyo’s largest prison to get a first hand look at the large number of foreign prisoners there. The prison usually never allows the media to film its interior, but they made a special exception in this case. Here are some highlights from the segment:

Their reporter is shown a factory room inside the prison, the prison cafeteria, the exercise grounds, and some cell blocks where foreign prisoners live. In almost every one of these cases, she mentions how there are many foreigners visible. All the prisoners have their faces blurred out, but the camera zooms in on prisoners with non-Japanese-looking skin tones, so that the viewers at home can share her sense of amazement at the large number of foreigners. The prison guards point out that the prison is operating at above the capacity it was built for, which means that some prisoners can’t get seats in the dining areas and bunkbeds must be placed in tiny cells designed to house one prisoner. In addition, these foreigners create trouble for the prison staff, since many can’t speak Japanese, and some cannot be served the same food as all the other prisoners for religious reasons (man, it must be “taihen” to feed those foreigners). We are told that this is becoming a problem for prisons all over Japan. Are foreign criminals causing Japan’s prisons to overflow?

The particular prison featured in the report said that 17% of their prisoners were foreign, which is a pretty large number for a group that represents such a small portion of Japan’s population. But is this a growing problem, as the report seems to suggest? In the case of this prison, a graph that they briefly show on the screen reveals that foreign prisoner numbers haven’t changed very much in the last 10 years:

As you can see, between 1997 and 2007, there has been a very small increase in the physical number of foreign prisoners (red) at the Tokyo prison. During that same period, there was also a much larger rise in the number of Japanese prisoners (blue). It doesn’t take an expert to see that foreigners aren’t the folks one should be worrying about in the case of this prison. Maybe instead of inviting the media into prisons so they can make alarmist reports, the authorities should be building more prisons?