Japan eyes community service as prisons overflow

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan is considering introducing community service as an alternative to custodial sentences for minor crimes in an effort to ease prison overcrowding, a government official said on Monday.

Currently, jail sentences can be applied immediately or suspended. Community service is set to be introduced this year as a condition for the suspension of some sentences, the Yomiuri Shimbun said on Monday.

But an official at the Justice Ministry said that although such changes were under consideration, no decision had been made on how community work such as cleaning parks or removing graffiti would be used.

"Of course community service can be used as a sentence in itself," the official said. "We are still considering this, and the government has not yet made a decision."

Japan's jails are full to overflowing. Prisons held 79 percent of their capacity in 1997, but the figure has been over 100 percent since 2001, leading to reports of inmates sentenced to solitary confinement being forced to share cells.

The Justice Ministry declined to comment on the reasons behind the increase in the number behind bars from about 51,000 in 1997 to 81,000 in 2006. But analysts have said sentencing has grown harsher in recent years.

Japan's figures are still paltry compared with the United States, where 2.26 million were being held in prisons at the end of 2006. The population of the United States is approximately 2.5 times that of Japan.