The book Recidivist Disabled* by YAMAMOTO Joji exposes a shocking situation of Japan today in which many disabled persons are socially and systematically made into “criminals.”   The book was published firstly in 2006, and in 2009 as the paperback edition.

Yamamoto shows that 3 of 10 inmates in Japan have an intellectual disability in the statistic data of 2004.  In addition, over 70% of inmates with intellectual disability are recidivists and 20% of them  are put in jail over 10 times.  How should we interpret these data?

For this kind of data, many people tend to believe that the intellectual disabled should  be unable to  recognize the social morality, and so be a threat to the social order.  In fact, the murder case  which  “a man with a lesser panda cap,” who were reported as mildly intellectually disabled, committed in 2001 pervasively evoked such interpretation.  The author  reveals  how much ignorance and prejudice it involves.

The phrase “over 10 recidivation” may be seemingly monstrous; but on the other hand it means that the crimes are so petty.  If it were so serious, he/she could not commit crimes so many times because she/he should stay in prison for a long time.

Yamamoto  points out that inmates with disability committed offenses such as shoplifting or dine-and-dash because they could not help in order to survive.  The “antisocial” behavior is caused by insufficiency of social welfare in Japan today.

In fact, as Yamamoto says,  in cases of petty crimes committed by the disable, legal judgement depends on whether he/she has his/her caretaker or not.  Prisons virtually functions as a substitute of social welfare.

This is only an abstract.  You should  feel more depressed if you read concrete and minute descriptions of the facts in this book.

*山本譲司 『累犯障害者』 新潮社、2006年．[The English title is only for the blog entry.]

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