Seeing the Other (<Special Issue>Treatment of Offenders in an Aging Society with a Declining Birthrate:Sustainable and Socially Inclusive Criminal Justice Policy in Japan)

Abstract

What here follows brings me to the core of what has been my criminological interest and also experience throughout life: The closer we come to another person, the more inhibitions are created against acting towards that person in ways usually seen as unacceptable. Seeing the other is an essential condition for being captured in the web of norms that makes us human. Punishment is an evil intended as evil. It means intentionally to let other people suffer. In social systems where people come close to each other and therefore see each other, limits are put against delivery of pain. Mediation or restorative justice gains better growth conditions. But there is much that prevents us from seeing the other in societies like ours. National, ethnic, cultural and social distance might dim the view. Social or geographical mobility might contribute to the same result. What is called crime is deeply imbedded in our social systems. May be the most important crime preventive design in our types of societies is one where caretaking of social systems is given priority to the idea of further material growth. May be models for the future these days is slightly behind us if we want to create democratic societies that opens for mutual informal control between humans standing close to each other, rather than by external powers as police and distant experts.