Masako Natori: Active as the First Female Director of the Correction Bureau

The Correction Bureau manages correctional facilities such as prisons, detention centers, juvenile training schools, and juvenile classification homes. Including branch offices, there are approximately 300 facilities nationwide, all of which are under the jurisdiction of the Correction Bureau.

There are just under 24,000 staff members, of whom about 90% are male, and about 90% of the inmates are also male. There are currently about 50,000 inmates, a downward trend since peaking in 2006. At its peak, the number exceeded 80,000. It feels like it has decreased significantly.

I think correctional facilities are generally unfamiliar to most people, but I believe they are the final stronghold that supports the nation's public order and safety by treating offenders for the last time and returning them to society.

Of course, the primary role is to strictly execute the sentence, but while they are inside, we must make sure that the inmates feel sincerely sorry for the victims and have the desire to live without ever committing a crime again once they return to society. For this reason, in addition to work as part of imprisonment with labor, we have recently been actively providing vocational training and various types of improvement guidance according to the crimes committed and the individual's problems, to encourage them to return to society with a will to rehabilitate.

It was unthinkable ten-plus years ago, but now we also provide employment support, such as conducting job interviews inside the prison and having them receive unofficial job offers so that they can start working immediately after returning to society. For inmates with disabilities or elderly inmates, we have also begun providing support to connect them with welfare benefits after their release.

That's right. Since a major prison reform began in 2003, we have been actively releasing information to the outside world under the banner of "Open Corrections" to help people understand the role of prisons and the situation of released inmates.

Twenty-some years ago, prisons were not shown to outsiders at all. By not showing them, it was as if we were protecting the human rights of the inmates, or rather, it was felt that it was not something to be shown to society.

But if that's the case, for the people in society, everything after the court's verdict is a black box, and they know nothing. No one is interested in a world they don't know, and they don't know what to do to prevent people coming out of prison from reoffending. So, we decided to show it to some extent.

Yes. In that same year, 2003, a policy was also issued to operate prisons together with the private sector using the PFI (Private Finance Initiative) method.

Since 2004, when work began to revise the Prison Law that had been in place since the Meiji era, I coordinated the work of creating the system and programs for improvement guidance to be newly introduced to prisons. At that time, I told the team members, "No one is providing education that takes reluctant adults (inmates), motivates them to learn, and changes their way of thinking and behavior. Let's challenge ourselves to create that system."

Reflecting on the crime and motivating them to rehabilitate is one thing, but an important part of improvement guidance is also providing special guidance according to the type of crime, ranging from sexual offenses and drug offenses to violent crimes and theft.

During such guidance, we investigate the individual's characteristics, plan the necessary correctional treatment based on the nature of the crime, and implement improvement guidance. I believe the cycle of analyzing the accumulation of guidance and leading it to further improvement of the program is important.

In the case of juveniles, it's not just the individual's problem; as you said, in most cases, an unhappy upbringing—being alienated from school, the community, and the home due to abuse or bullying—is in the background of the delinquency.

Juveniles in such circumstances are very stubborn, saying, "I don't trust anything adults say." Therefore, first, the instructors at the juvenile training school devote their efforts to establishing a human relationship, and then they start working with the juvenile once they begin to open their hearts.

Normally, they need to learn basic things like common sense and how to have human relationships that are naturally taught by parents, the community, and schools. Therefore, while living in a group, we meticulously carry out activities such as giving them roles and helping them acquire regular lifestyle habits.

Yes. Recently, there is an aspect where inmates being seen by residents outside the facility is avoided, but originally in Japan, starting with the development of Hokkaido in the Meiji era, there is a history of inmates building roads and performing activities for the community.

Currently, after selecting eligible individuals, we are working on things like cleaning parks in response to requests from the community. Inmates who have been trained to obtain a barber's license cut the hair of residents at nursing homes, and recently, since there are areas where traditional crafts are declining and there are no successors, we sometimes make traditional crafts as prison work.

Also, there is a prison called the "Shimane Asahi Rehabilitation Program Center" which is operated through public-private collaboration. There, in cooperation with the Guide Dog Association, they raise candidate dogs before they become guide dogs.

There is also an aspect where the inmates themselves are healed by interacting with living creatures and develop a feeling of wanting to do their best. At the completion ceremony where they finish raising a guide dog candidate and hand it over to the Guide Dog Association, an elderly inmate shed tears and said, "I will live a life that I won't be ashamed of in front of [Name of the guide dog]"... The joy of contributing to society and being useful to people is the same for inmates, and it contributes greatly to their rehabilitation.

In juvenile training schools and prisons, some people say, "This is the first time I've met someone I can call 'Teacher'." When that happens, they feel, "I don't want to do anything that would betray my teacher anymore." When a connection with a person is formed, they feel like thinking about how they live from now on because they don't want to cause trouble for that person, or because they want that person to praise them. This is true for any human being. It's the same for people who have committed crimes.

This is based on the regulatory reform of 2003. Prisons became overcrowded, exceeding their capacity, and while it was difficult to increase the number of national public servants, there was a desire to operate prisons with the help of private sector power.

Specifically, we entrust them with the provision of meals in prisons, general affairs work, and security work that does not involve the direct use of force against inmates, such as monitoring the surrounding areas. And sometimes, we have them realize ideas that the government alone would not have thought of, such as the guide dog training I mentioned earlier.

There were also effects we hadn't anticipated. The initiative I mentioned earlier, of conducting job interviews inside the prison and giving unofficial offers, started when a person from a private company working as an operator wondered, "What will happen to these people after they leave? Is there anything we can do?"

Rather than us telling them, it is far better to have people actually see and know what is happening in prisons and what is necessary to prevent reoffending by inmates.

I was in Professor Masakuma Uchiyama's international relations seminar in the Department of Political Science, Faculty of Law at the Juku. Every year at the Mita Festival, we presented a Model United Nations General Assembly where we spoke from the standpoint of each country. The country I chose was India, and I chose the theme of the economic gap and poverty between developing and developed countries, which was called the North-South problem at the time.

I graduated from university two years before the enactment of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act, and there was a big difference between men and women in employment. However, I thought that if I were a national public servant, they would hire women in the same way, so I studied hard and passed the civil service examination.

However, even though I thought someone would hire me, depending on the ministry, some only hired women every other year, and many others turned me away at the door without an interview or explanation. In that situation, I was told that if it was the Ministry of Justice, the Correction Bureau had women's prisons and juvenile training schools and there was a certain amount of work for women, so I went to visit a girls' juvenile training school.

Until then, I knew nothing at all about prisons or juvenile training schools. I was told about the backgrounds of the girls there and learned that people in such circumstances still exist in Japan today, and I wondered why girls who looked like ordinary junior high and high school students were being held there.

I felt that the problems of people living in poverty and abuse exist within the country, and that they have something in common with the problems of developing countries that I had studied.

That's right. I thought that while these people may have committed crimes and caused trouble for society, they might also have a large aspect of being victims, so I joined the Correction Bureau. However, it was a field I knew nothing about, and if anything, it was all dark stories, so I worried a lot at first about whether I could make it here.

At the Correction Bureau, we first work at the actual treatment site and experience how to rehabilitate a single individual. For example, if you work at a juvenile training school, you are assigned to a certain boy and interact with him as his individual instructor for a long time. When I was young, I also experienced the sites of juvenile training schools and juvenile classification homes, and I also served as the Director of a girls' juvenile training school.

And what I remember most, although it was painful at the time, is the creation of the improvement guidance system and programs for inmates that I mentioned earlier. Because the enforcement date of the law was approaching, we had to give it shape in just one year. Including responding to the Diet, I really worked without sleeping, but it became the best memory of working seriously.

After that, as the content of what we had initially only created the form for became more substantial through practice, and we began to see results leading to a decrease in the recidivism rate, I really felt that I had been useful for an important job for the country.

In the Ministry of Justice, my work was centered on corrections, but from my late 40s, I served as the Director of the Office of Communications and Public Relations and the Director of the Facilities Division of the Minister's Secretariat, and I was also given a lot of work in organizational management other than the treatment of offenders, such as budget-related and general affairs-related work. Creating a comfortable working environment became a major part of the latter half of my working life.

There were about two times when I was transferred to a place where I thought, "This is the only place I don't want to go," and when I was young, I was almost in tears the day before going (laughs). But looking back later, I can feel that the experience with my colleagues at that time was actually what helped me grow the most. It's a mysterious thing. All jobs are connected, and I feel now that there was no meaningless experience.

When I was hired, there wasn't even a female section chief in the Correction Bureau of the Ministry of Justice. Let alone becoming the position I am in now in the field of public security that supports the nation's public order; I didn't think of it 100 percent at the time. In the past, facility directors were limited to female facilities, but now there are also female directors of male prisons.

Over the last 10 years or so, I have gradually been entrusted with various jobs and evaluated under the idea of expanding the scope of work for women. The working environment for women has really changed significantly, and I feel that young people today are treated almost equally. Within the Correction Bureau, the number of female division directors and assistant directors has increased, and things have changed. I think the "minority" has changed the organization into something flexible and substantial.

When I became the Director-General of the Human Rights Bureau, I ended up looking at corrections from the outside, so it became an opportunity to think about many things. The Human Rights Bureau is a place that responds to human rights violation cases throughout Japan and carries out awareness-raising activities against various types of discrimination and prejudice. For example, the elderly, people with disabilities, children and women who are targets of abuse or bullying, leprosy and Buraku discrimination, and more recently, hate speech against foreigners and LGBT discrimination.

Among those, I was reminded that only regarding prejudice and discrimination against former prison inmates, there is inevitably a feeling that "it's natural because they have caused trouble for people." Therefore, it is incredibly difficult to ask people to accept these individuals back into society without discrimination or prejudice. However, that prejudice isolates former inmates in society and becomes a factor in the next crime or delinquency.

After that, I became the Director of the Correction Bureau and am doing my best to rehabilitate inmates within prisons so they can live in society without reoffending. What is important is collaboration with local communities and local governments to have them accepted without social discrimination or prejudice. To gain the understanding of those around us, I think we must make the things we are doing inside prisons better known to society.

In the field of corrections, most people would rather not be involved if possible, and of course, they don't want to go to prison (laughs). However, what is happening inside is a microcosm of social contradictions and issues, including the problems of inequality and poverty.

The fact that prisons are now overflowing with elderly people is one such example. I believe that what we are trying to solve as an administration within this world of corrections actually leads to the resolution of various social issues throughout Japan and to the creation of a society where everyone can live comfortably.

On the other hand, I believe that the daily work of correctional officers is a very meaningful job that scoops up the life of a single person in front of them from the bottom. I would definitely like students to apply for it. I want students to experience a wide range of things without staying within the narrow world around them.