Proxy Justice: Families of Offenders in Contemporary Japan.
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2018-05
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Abstract
This ethnographic study examines the repercussions of criminal justice contact on
families of offenders in Japan. From January 2014 to August 2015, I observed and interviewed
fifty individuals, whose kin came into conflict with the law for violent, property, sex, and drugrelated
offenses. Through a feminist lens, I looked at the families’ life experiences including
their perceptions of the courtesy stigma, the feelings of ambivalence toward the criminal justice
system as well as the offender, and the gendered and unequal distribution of offender support
activities. In the end, I conclude that families of offenders, women in particular, often step in to
fill the voids left by criminal justice institutions and social services to provide offenders allinclusive
care.
This study pushes boundaries of feminist criminology by showing how women can be
affected by the male-dominated world of crime and criminal justice, other than as victims and
offenders. Due to cultural notions of femininity and women’s subordinate status in the family,
female relatives of offenders are often pressured to work as a proxy for agents of control, aiding
the very system that incapacitates, disenfranchises, and marginalizes their kin. This perspective
opens a new direction for thinking about the consequences of criminal justice contact on the
family, questioning the fundamental efficacy and ethicality of the criminal justice system.
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punishment, family, collateral consequences, stigma, ethnography
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