In September 2017, we invited Prof. David Wexler in Tokyo to hold the symposium on Therapeutic Jurispru- dence, who is the pioneer in this area of study. We tried to build on the Japanese system of therapeutic jus- tice. We discussed ways to create therapies for new offenders. After some consideration of the program and therapy for domestic violence, child abuse, drug addiction, and theft by people with intellectual disabilities, we examined the potential and direction for creating a new way to study interpersonal violence in family and criminal behavior by combining therapeutic justice with restorative justice and clinical work in the context of recovery. In this symposium, we would like to develop this method under the title of “From Punish- ment-based intervention to Harm-Reduction-based treatment.”

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An increasing number of people with disabilities and older persons are being accommodated in the prison. With regard to this serious situation, this study aimed to explain the author’s practice of defense in the crimi- nal trial for these people. The important point is providing care not punishment. It is the matter connected with the decision-making support to the suspect defendant person with mental retardation, developmental disability, and mental illness. Author’s activities for these people involved trying to establish welfare system through legal procedures. The author concludes that these practices in the process of criminal trial represent advocacy for creating therapeutic justice in Japan and it is important for social workers to prepare a rehabili- tation plan in collaboration with lawyers by seeking corroboration for the needs of welfare support to obtain a second chance in life.

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This article examined the clinical practice for offenders with special needs for clinical supports. The author will describe a new initiative that is being promoted as the theory of therapy for offenders and judicial clini- cal practice in the context of therapeutic justice. Currently, the author is involved in clinical practice that fo- cuses on overcoming violence in intimate relationships within three types of group work : group work for male DV offenders, family reintegration group work for abusive fathers, and a program for sexual offenders to prevent re-offense. The argument was based on the author’s experience of these practices concerning the de- velopment of the therapeutic justice system.

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The purpose of this article was to explain a novel idea for criminal justice, “therapeutic jurisprudence,” im- plementing the rehabilitation process in the criminal procedure. For this purpose, the article introduces ther- apeutic justice based on therapeutic jurisprudence as the new concept for designing criminal justice and the problem-solving courts that are developing in the world. The second purpose of this article was to suggest the renovation of the Japanese criminal justice system based on therapeutic justice in order to stop repeat offence by the former defendants. Although there are several projects in the governmental sectors for reducing recidi- vism, this article argues that the decreasing of recidivism in Japan will be achieved not by these projects cur- rently promoted by the public sectors but by the development of problem-solving court system targeting drug addictions and repeated thefts such as kleptomania.

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This article pointed out issues concerning practice related to therapeutic justice in Japan and in particular, collaboration between criminal justice and human service professionals. The author made a comparison be- tween Japan with Victoria, Australia by examining the following points : (1) rehabilitation support and prob- lem-solving courts, (2) compulsory treatment and advocacy, (3) correction in Victoria’s Disability Framework, (4) development of specific service sector & professional training, and (5) public attitude. Additionally, prob- lems faced by community-based recovery support organizations in Japan were considered. These included an aim of the organizations’ services, the support organizations and workers’ power over the clients, and limited service availability in the community. In order for the support organizations to not be utilized as a means of social control and surveillance by the criminal justice agencies and to serve an appropriate support function in the course of further development of the collaboration, it is necessary to explore a wide range of issues in- cluding the ones examined in this article in addition to the question raised by the author at the symposium : “What do we need to do for therapeutic justice to not become a new mechanism of social control through professionals’ dominance?”

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In this article, We discussed “therapeutic relationship”, which is one of the important factors for practicing “therapeutic justice”, based on the following three points. (1) It is necessary to be conscious of “therapeutic correctional relationship” in which experts do not abuse power and also know that criminals have power. (2) As you can learn from Norway’s practice, it is important that practitioners and criminals “engage in dialogue” in the real sense and interact in a humane way. (3) Baed on the interview survey conducted by the author with Japanese ex-inmates, it is essential for an inmate to be respected as a person. What is important for prac- ticing therapeutic justice is that practitioners learn how to create and maintain places and times to meet crim- inals as “people” while exercising their roles and certain power. We believe that training to develop therapeu- tic relationships is as essential as legal development.

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The present research investigated if (1) the camera perspective of video-recording investigation affected and (2) Japanese multiple play method for presenting video-recording investigation to juries affected their judg- ment of defendant’s credibility. In study 1, 56 students evaluated voluntariness of confession after being pre- sented with one of six police investigation videos. The result indicated that the camera perspective affected judgment of defendant’s credibility and the method of displaying affects investigator’s coercion. In study 1, display of mock multiple plays had a high-angle view of the investigator and defendant. Study 2 investigated the factor by change to on screens of different sizes. Thirty-four students were presented one of three presen- tations that changed videos on small screen. The findings showed that high-angle view which is used in Japa- nese multiple play method affected judgments of defendant’s credibility. Two experiments indicated that a camera perspective bias as suggested by previous studies and presenting videotaped investigation in Japan give more voluntarily. Implications of the findings regarding in court presentation of video-recorded evidence are discussed.

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Although attitudes towards criminal justice have been broadly studied since the 1970s, it has been pointed out that diversity in scales and constructs generates great confusion in interpreting the results yielded by studies. Thus, the present study aims to create a scale that measures attitudes towards criminal justice with high reliability and validity. In particular, we reviewed existing arguments, paying special attention to those about criminalization, to identify six elements to be included in the scale. This was followed by a question- naire survey research. Based on a confirmatory factor analysis, we found that attitudes towards the criminal justice scale consist of four factors, showing high reliability and validity. Further implications are discussed.

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Construal level theory (CLT) proposes that distant entities are represented more in terms of their central fea- tures (e.g., actor’s trait) while proximal entities are represented predominately by peripheral features (e.g., contexts). From this perspective of CLT, we investigated how the psychological distance from a criminal case influences the cognitive processes underlying judicial decisions about a defendant. We conducted two experi- ments with undergraduate students. Participants were exposed to a short scenario describing a murder case that happened a few decades or a few months ago. Their implicit and explicit inferences regarding the defen- dant were then measured. Results indicated that participants tended to attribute the cause of the crime more to the defendant’s trait at the explicit level and assess the defendant’s culpability more severely when they were led to believe that the case occurred in the distant rather than recent past (Experiment 1). Moreover, it was shown that spontaneous situational inferences occurred more often for the psychologically proximal than the psychologically distant case (Experiment 2). Implications of the findings for court judgments are dis- cussed in terms of fairness of punishment.

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This paper reports the case in which the psychological evaluation of a defendant accused of inflicting injury that caused death was necessary. Defendant “A” was living with co-defendant “B” and victim “C”. According to the first story, which A told to his pleaders, there was a rule in their life that one who had broken house rules had to be subject to violent acts by other housemates, and C had died as a result of such violent acts. However, after several visits by psychological evaluators, A confessed that B had dominated A and C psycho- logically and had abused them for a long time. Psychological evaluators testified in court that A’s personality had a tendency to be dominated by others and due to the change in his testimony, he would not attempt to put the blame on B. As a result, a judgement was delivered considering B’s domination over A and C, while it revealed that “forced spontaneity” of a psychologically dominated person should be argued furthermore.

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Copyright researchers have argued that protection of copyright holders’ interests was overwhelming since the recent development of copyright law and that public’s attitudes toward copyright were mainly ignored. In this context, it is crucial to investigate the public attitude toward copyright. This research aimed to explore factors that determine support for sanctioning of copyright violation using a vignette-based questionnaire. In partic- ular, building on existing studies, we investigated the effects of subjective and objective seriousness of crime, possibility of reoffence, and occurrence on support for sanctioning. Our results indicated that : (a) support for sanctioning copyright was determined by subjective seriousness and possibility of re-offense and (b) sup- port for sanctioning it was better predicted by objective than subjective evaluations of crime. Implications were further discussed.

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