Here in Japan, the police have wider discretion over how to handle young offenders. And let's face it, I don't care what society, what racial group, young males have the highest crime rates (it seems proving your machismo to make yourself more obviously sexually desirable also tends to injure other people).
Japanese police are quite likely to detain a young offender, beat him around a bit, and then say, look, don't ever cross my path again and no records get filed past this police box. I'm sure young Japanese men do a lot of things wrong, including serious crimes, like causing deadly auto accidents while speeding. I think where Japan fails is often on issues of law enforcement--lives could be saved if they did do a better job enforcing traffic laws. Also, a lot of women could get better justice if they became victims of sex crimes and stalking if the police in Japan had zero tolerance for this. And the police have been lax until recently on pursuing child abuse cases.
However, Japan doesn't have anywhere near the number of young males serving out prison sentences as the US does. A lot of would-be hooligans from overseas at the recent World Cup in Japan and Korea have found that their worst punishment was to have to sit out the tournament in a holding cell, handled a bit roughly by police, and then to be deported with a request never to come back. Would the US have been so forgiving?
Most sociologists agree, even given the under-reporting in Japan, that Japan has much lower crime rates than the US. The US has a gulag on its hands.
CEJ
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