In Japan, a Prison for Reckless Drivers

The prisoners march in lock-step, sporting identical crew cuts and crisply pressed gray uniforms. When a guard calls out, they bow in unison, their backs bent at precisely the same angle.

The inmates may eat as much as they wish, but they are not permitted to speak during meals. They all have the same prison-issued calendar hanging next to their bunks. Those who break the myriad rules are put in a room alone to meditate and reflect on their failures. Above all, they are taught to repent and make amends to their victims.

This is not a place for hard-core criminals. Ichihara Prison is reserved exclusively for dangerously irresponsible drivers. The prison, founded at a time when traffic deaths in Japan were rapidly increasing, continues to provide a powerful reminder for those who might forget that once behind the wheel, they will be held responsible for controlling a potentially lethal instrument. It could be one reason why gridlocked Japan has not developed road rage.

While Ichihara Prison may seem strict to Westerners, by Japanese standards it is a country-club jail. There is no barbed wire, no guard towers or dogs, and less of the draconian regimentation that is the norm for Japanese prisons. The average sentence here is 10.8 months. Half the inmates are serving time for vehicular homicide, while the rest are in for drunken driving, fleeing the scene of an accident and other traffic crimes.

“Most of them used to be ordinary salarymen,” Deputy Warden Satoshi Ishiyama said, referring to the company men who are the backbone of Japanese society.

Ichihara Prison appears to be a model for successful rehabilitation of lesser offenders, boasting a recidivism rate that would be the envy of any American prison--just 7.7%.

Nevertheless, a nascent movement supporting the rights of auto-accident victims is criticizing Ichihara Prison as too lenient and attacking the Japanese judiciary for putting far fewer people than before behind bars for wreaking mayhem with their automobiles.

Ichihara “should be made like an ordinary prison,” said Wataru Ide, whose 18-year-old daughter was hit and killed by a truck while riding her bicycle through a crosswalk on her way to school eight years ago. “People there are not really treated like criminals.”

The call for stiffer punishment for errant drivers is just one example of an overall hardening in the Japanese public’s attitude toward crime.

“My understanding is that in America and Europe the laws have been getting stricter, but in Japan they have not been changed to adapt to the times,” Ide said. “The rights of victims are completely ignored.”

After his daughter’s death, Ide founded the Bereaved Families of Traffic Victims, a group that now has about 2,000 members, although only about 400 are active. It is the only group offering support for traffic victims, but at least six counseling centers for victims of other crimes have sprung up around Japan, a new development in a nation where unfortunates have been expected to suffer in silence.

“Very few victims ever stand up,” said Ide, an ear, nose and throat specialist who practices in a pleasant suburb east of Tokyo in Chiba prefecture, not far from Ichihara Prison.

It never occurred to him to question how police or courts functioned until he became disgusted over the way his daughter’s death was handled. Now he is pressing for legal changes.

The truck driver who struck Yoko Ide had been involved in another fatal car crash, yet he was not indicted in either case, Ide said. The doctor found out only by accident that the man would not be prosecuted, when a police clerk let the information slip.

Fewer Prosecutions in Fatal Crashes

Such an outcome is not unusual. The percentage of people prosecuted in fatal traffic accidents has dropped from nearly 80% in the early 1970s to less than 20% in 1995, according to Kobe University professor Yusaku Futatsugi, author of “Traffic Death.”

The book, one of several recent volumes on the subject, argues that thieves, embezzlers and other criminals tend to receive heavier sentences than those who kill with their cars. The rate of prosecution for those arrested in 1995 on charges of negligent homicide or injury was only 1,580 per 10,000 accidents; of these, only 13 drivers ended up in prison, while 70 had their sentences suspended, according to Futatsugi.

“Penalties are very light these days,” Ide said. “A white-collar criminal might get five years, but someone who has killed gets less than a year. . . . Which is more important: objects or human life? In Japan, it’s objects. Cars have priority over people.”

Road carnage in Japan has in fact declined sharply, from a peak of 16,765 killed and about 981,000 injured in 1970, to 9,640 killed and about 959,000 injured last year. (The per-capita accident rate in the United States, with twice the population, is much higher, with 41,798 killed and 3.4 million injured in 1995.)

But perhaps some victims’ families are standing up now because traffic death has become so mundane, such an accepted fact of modern life, that family members find it hard to bear, Futatsugi said.

“Even the legal world ignores them, which is akin to rubbing salt into their wounds,” he said.

Japan Bows to Critics, Opens Ichihara Prison

Few experts would agree that Japan’s prison system in general is too soft; it has often been criticized by foreigners as too punitive. Last year, Amnesty International issued a scathing report on human rights abuses against foreigners held in Japanese prisons.

“From ancient times, Japanese prisons were places to make people suffer, and that hasn’t changed,” attorney Futaba Igarashi said. “So the Japanese right has never claimed that treatment in prison is too lenient. They just want the sentences made longer.”

That is why Ichihara Prison is a novelty. It was opened in 1969 after Japan agreed to adhere to United Nations standards for more lenient correctional institutions for lesser offenders. At the time, the government planned to build more such “open” prisons, but only two others, for women and juveniles, were ever launched, Igarashi said.

Although Ichihara would be deemed a roaring success by American standards, there are indications that the Justice Ministry is losing enthusiasm for the experiment, perhaps because it stresses rehabilitation over punishment, Igarashi said. The prison has space for 420 inmates but now holds only 175.

The prisoners arrive in handcuffs and spend their first few weeks in tiny cells. Next, they graduate to barracks and less restrictive regimes until being assigned to individual rooms just before their release. They work, making soy paste and other products, and some learn basket-weaving, which is believed to instill patience.

They are permitted to read newspapers and most books, and there are sometimes classical music concerts in summer.

Those who wish to drive again undergo an intensive reeducation program--including practice drives with instructors on the prison grounds--to make them safe drivers.

Three inmates interviewed during one of the rare visits granted to a journalist said they were grateful to have been sent to Ichihara.

Although 67% of Ichihara inmates were under the influence of alcohol at the time of their accidents, those who are deemed alcoholic--or incorrigible, violent or at risk for suicide--are sent to regular prison.

The prisoners were allowed to speak only in the presence of wardens and on condition that their names not be used. All three were model penitents, although a 21-year-old who caused a fatal accident driving after his license had been revoked admitted that he was not confident of his ability to control his behavior in the future.

After Prison, Inmate Expects Discrimination

Another inmate, a 29-year-old former truck driver serving a one-year sentence, said he knew he was in no shape to drive at the time he plowed into a construction site, killing one person and gravely injuring another. But he said he felt he couldn’t tell his company that personal problems were interfering with his work.

His bosses have promised to keep his job open for him, but he said he does not want to drive a truck again for fear of causing another accident.

Asked whether he fears discrimination when he goes out looking for a new job, he replied: “I think it’s normal for me to be discriminated against. . . . I have killed a person, so I am a killer. And if there is some negative feeling toward me, there is nothing that can be done about it.”

Before entering prison, the truck driver had gone several times to apologize to the person he injured and the family of the dead man--an integral part of the pretrial processing of offenders--but the man’s family told him not to come again. “Probably, when they see me, they are reminded of their dead son. . . . They said, ‘We forgive you, and let’s leave it at that.’ ”

Winning the victim’s forgiveness is crucial. Those whose apologies are not accepted, or who cannot or do not make adequate financial restitution, are much more likely to be sentenced to prison and less likely to be given early parole, officials and attorneys said.

Moral indoctrination is also a key part of the Ichihara program, Deputy Warden Ishiyama said. The inmates have built a Monument of Atonement in the prison garden and line up together in front of it to pay their respects to their victims.

“The Japanese way of thinking is that one must never cause trouble to others,” Ishiyama explained. Thus prisoners are lectured about social responsibility, the dangers of alcohol and drugs, and their legal and moral duty to pay restitution, which can run up to about $480,000.

“We educate them that they will have to pay for their whole lives and that they must never, ever forget their victims,” Ishiyama said. “We try our best so that they will never come back.”

Prison Isn’t Deterrent for All Drivers

Many of the inmates are hiding their whereabouts from their neighbors--and even from their own children. “Some tell their kid that Daddy is working abroad,” the warden said.

So is bad-drivers’ prison an effective deterrent? It’s hard to say. Some people cite it as a reason for not seeking a driver’s license or for obeying Japan’s zero-alcohol law for drivers. But Ichihara taxi driver Hiroyuki Shimada said the city still has its share of drunken-driving accidents.

“People don’t mind spending money to drink, but they think it’s too expensive to call a taxi to take them home,” Shimada said. “You’d think they wouldn’t drink and drive, especially here, but they do. And when [police] try to crack down on it, the bars complain their business is being ruined.”

Makiko Inoue and Chiaki Kitada of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.