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

The Correction Bureau is responsible for managing 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 fall under the jurisdiction of the Correction Bureau.

There are just under 24,000 staff members, of whom about 90% are men, and about 90% of the inmates are also men. The inmate population is currently around 50,000, which has been on a downward trend since peaking in 2006. At its peak, it exceeded 80,000. It feels like it has decreased significantly.

I think correctional facilities are places that the general public is not very familiar with, but they are the final treatment for offenders before returning them to society. I believe they should be called the last bastion that supports the country's public order and ensures peace and safety.

Of course, the primary goal is to strictly execute the sentence. However, while they are inside, we must ensure that inmates feel truly sorry for their victims and develop a desire to live without ever committing a crime again once they return to society. Therefore, in addition to labor as part of imprisonment with work, we have recently been actively providing vocational training and various types of improvement guidance based on the crime committed and the individual's problems, working to encourage them to re-enter society with a will to rehabilitate.

This 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 they can start working immediately upon 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. It was as if we were protecting the human rights of inmates by not showing them, or that it was simply not something to be shown to society.

But in the end, for the people in society, everything after the court's verdict becomes a black box, and they know nothing. No one is interested in a world they don't know, and they don't understand what should be done to prevent people coming out of prison from reoffending. So, we decided to show it to a certain extent.

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

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 improvement guidance system and programs to be newly introduced to prisons. At that time, I told the team members, "No one else is doing education that takes unwilling adults (inmates), gives them a desire to learn, and tries to change their way of thinking and behavior. Let's challenge ourselves to create that system."

Reflecting on the crime and fostering a desire for rehabilitation is part of it, but an important part of improvement guidance is also providing special guidance according to the type of crime, ranging from sex 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 details of the crime, and execute the improvement guidance. I believe the cycle of analyzing the accumulated guidance and linking it to further improvement of the programs is vital.

In the case of juveniles, it's not just the individual's problem; as you say, 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, juvenile training school instructors first focus on establishing a human relationship and then work with the juvenile once they begin to open up.

Normally, children learn common sense and how to have human relationships naturally from their parents, community, and school. Since these juveniles need to learn these basic things, we meticulously start by having them perform role-based activities and acquire regular lifestyle habits while living in a group.

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 screening the subjects, we carry out initiatives such as cleaning parks in response to local requests. Inmates trained to obtain barber licenses cut the hair of residents at nursing homes, and recently, since there are regions where traditional crafts are declining and there are no successors, we sometimes produce traditional crafts as prison work.

Also, there is a prison called the "Shimane Asahi Rehabilitation Support Center" which is operated through public-private collaboration. There, in cooperation with a 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 a feeling of wanting to work hard grows. At the completion ceremony where they finish raising a guide dog candidate and hand it over to the guide dog association, elderly inmates shed tears and say, "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 others 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 start to feel like they want to think about how they live 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 reforms 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 providing meals in prisons, general affairs tasks, and security duties that do not involve the direct use of force against inmates, such as monitoring the perimeter. And sometimes, they realize ideas that the government alone would never 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, where job interviews are held inside the prison to give unofficial offers, started because 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?"

It is far better to have people actually see and know what is going on in prisons and what is necessary to prevent reoffending than for us to just talk about it.

I was in Professor Masakuma Uchiyama's International Relations seminar in the Department of Political Science at the Juku Faculty of Law. Every year at the Mita Festival, we presented a Model United Nations General Assembly where we spoke from the perspective of different countries. I chose India and focused on 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 exam.

However, when I thought someone would hire me, depending on the ministry, some only hired women every other year, and many turned me away at the door without an interview or explanation. In the midst of that, I was told that at the Ministry of Justice, the Correction Bureau had women's prisons and juvenile training schools and thus 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 upbringings of the girls there and learned that people in such circumstances still exist in Japan. I wondered why these 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 existed domestically, and that they had something in common with the problems of developing countries I had studied.

Exactly. I thought that while these people might have committed crimes and caused trouble for society, they also have a strong aspect of being victims, so I joined the Correction Bureau. But it was a field I knew nothing about, and since it's mostly dark stories, I worried a lot at first about whether I could make it here.

In the Correction Bureau, you first work at the actual treatment site to experience how to rehabilitate a single individual. For example, if you work at a juvenile training school, you are assigned to a specific juvenile and interact with them as their individual instructor. When I was young, I also experienced the front lines 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, though 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 dealing with the Diet, I really worked without sleeping, but it became the best memory of working seriously.

After that, as the content of what we initially only created the framework 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 in an important national task.

At the Ministry of Justice, my work 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 organizational management work other than offender treatment, such as budget and general affairs 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 I thought, "This is the only place I don't want to go," and the day before I went, I was almost in tears when I was young (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 strange thing. All jobs are connected, and I feel now that there were no meaningless experiences.

When I was hired, there wasn't even a female section chief in the Correction Bureau of the Ministry of Justice. Let alone reaching my current position in the field of public security that supports the country's public order—I didn't think that was 100 percent possible at the time. Facility Directors used to be limited to female facilities, but now there are female directors of male prisons.

Over the last 10 years or so, I have gradually been entrusted with various tasks under the idea of expanding the scope of work for women, and I have come to be evaluated. The working environment for women has truly 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, which gave me the 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 activities against various forms 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 recently, hate speech against foreigners and LGBT discrimination.

In the midst of that, I was reminded that only regarding prejudice and discrimination against former prison inmates, there is an inevitable feeling that "it's natural because they caused trouble for people." That's why saying "please accept these people back into society without discrimination or prejudice" is incredibly difficult. However, that prejudice isolates released 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 cooperation with local communities and local governments to have them accepted without social discrimination or prejudice. To gain the understanding of those around us, I believe we must make the society more aware of what we are doing inside prisons.

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 the contradictions and challenges of society, 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 creating a society where everyone can live comfortably.

On the other hand, I believe the daily work of a correction officer is a very meaningful job that scoops up the life of a single person in front of them from the bottom. I definitely want students to consider it as a career. I want students to experience a wide range of things without staying within the narrow world around them.