Crime and Justice in Contemporary Japan by Jianhong Liu & Setsuo Miyazawa

Author:Jianhong Liu & Setsuo Miyazawa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

5 Afterward: June 2017s Vantage Point27

This chapter is revised from the English draft of an article that appeared in Japanese language translation in SEKAI in June 2014 (Levin, 2014, Iwakawa transl.). Despite the clarity of calls for criminal justice reform in both the United States and Japan in the intervening years, it seems that little progress has been made in either nation.

5.1 Looking at the United States : “More Dangerous than Trump”

While the focus of this chapter is on Japan, it seems essential to take note of dynamics in the United States since 2014. In the United States, communities of color have not only maintained engagement with issues concerning criminal justice, but they have grown in the reach and level of that engagement. Most notable is the Black Lives Matter movement, launched in 2012 after the death of Trayvon Martin, which has taken root and grown into a powerful change mechanism and is now well established in the American political arena.28 Together with this popular movement, both the public and intellectual communities have become better versed in issues surrounding racial justice and criminal justice system, as writings such as The New Jim Crow (Alexander, 2012; Joseph, 2016),29 and research focused on impacts of implicit bias are now much more widely understood (e.g., Levinson & Smith, 2012).

If I were writing this chapter in the Spring of 2016 with anticipation of a Democratic majority in the Congress putting forward legislation to the presidential administration of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, I would see circumstances offering some degree of optimism for progressive reform. One year ago, one could see some of these movements gaining traction not only in public discourse but even in policy initiatives (e.g., Drabold, 2016; Glanton, 2016). Granted, the power of the movement reflected worsening conditions in the society, and some, including Professor Alexander, did not trust the prospect of a Hillary Clinton administration (Alexander, 2016), but nevertheless, the late 2015 and into 2016 presented any number of news items pointing toward positive change (e.g., Dyson, 2015; Hulse, 2016; Joseph, 2016; Zapotosky & Harlan, 2016).

Regrettably, the story is not nearly as sanguine in June 2017. Even before Donald Trump’s nomination as the Republican candidate for the US presidency and his subsequent election, racial dynamics in the American criminal justice system remained deeply problematic. The incarceration of millions described in The New Jim Crow had barely changed, and violent deaths at the hands of police and in similar acts continued to tally up. Following Donald Trump’s ascendency to the Republican Party nomination , a progressive bipartisan crime bill loosening devastating constraints such as mandatory minimums in federal sentencing lost momentum and died in the Senate (Hulse, 2016).

Whatever optimism may have been emerging in 2015 and 2016 under an Obama administration has been absolutely obliterated by the Trump administration and the leadership of Jeff Sessions at the Department of Justice (e.g., Ruiz, 2017). Even in his first weeks in office, the Attorney General directed the Bureau of Prisons to “return to its

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