A prison guard has been sacked after engaging a prisoner in otaku-related conversation.
The affair began at Chiba Prison, where a 31-year-old guard was found to have chatted with a prisoner at least 20 times over a 4 year period.
Their conversations dealt with such topics as games and manga, including as the number of volumes various manga reached and the price of DVDs, with the officer helpfully looking up the details at home on his PC and telling the inmate later.
The guard explained that “As he was a difficult inmate, I thought that by accommodating him he would become easier to manage.”
He is also accused of other unforgivably improper conduct, including telling other inmates the names of his fellow officers.
Once his actions came to light, he was subject to disciplinary measures and then “voluntarily” retired the same day.
The prison head offered the usual formulaic platitude – “I offer my profound apologies to the country, and I intend to ensure no such lapse occurs again in future.”
The prisoner’s sentence and crime were not specified, although Chiba Prison only houses male first-time offenders serving sentences of 8 years or more.
Japanese prisons are known for their harsh conditions (at least compared to the prison-hotels run by many other developed nations), although the authorities tend to treat custodial sentences as a last resort and Japan’s incarceration rate of 54 per 100,000 citizens compares rather favourably to such bastions of liberty as the US, with a rate of 715 per 100,000.
However, the prevailing attitude is that offenders are to be subjected to extremes of discipline and austerity – and it would seem this extends even to friendly conversations between inmates and guards.
People that do a good job get sacked; people that abuse their rights get ignored or get light sentences.
And you thought America was stupid.
Yeah, the Prison Industrial Complex is out of control here in the U.S.. We surpass even China in the total number of the imprisoned. Then again, the prison lobbyist are one of our biggest.
Japan is now a fucking Nazi country.
Don’t believe me? Look at how they handle just about any topic with maximum cringeworthyness.
What are they really up to? Destroy their own media culture? Let the country being run by incompetent fags like TEPCO and that lame government that can’t even properly support the quake victims?
You’Re a shame, Japan. A fucking shame. All of you have lost face, except for the poor people who are now suffering in the “concentration camps” (i heard they call them refugee camps…) and the poor people who were forced to die in the destroyed nuclear plant.
Most workers are NOT there of their own volition.
More like “Jailer Sacked for Trying To Solve a Problem”.
If Japan had as many blacks per capita as the U.S. does, it would have a comparable rate of imprisonment of its citizens. Non-criminal blacks and non-criminal non-blacks in the U.S. have a right to live in freedom, and they do. But freedom does not mean free to commit crimes without the pain of punishment. It means freedom from unnecessary governmental interference in our private lives. In the U.S., criminals are incarcerated. When they stop habitually committing crimes, the incarceration rate will fall. In either case, Americans remain the most free people history has ever seen, and the comparison between the U.S. and Japan’s incarceration rates remains irrelevant.