Japan

The Volunteer Probation Officer Law of 1950 formalized Japan’s unique and long-standing reliance on volunteers to assist professional probation officers and aid offenders of all ages with rehabilitation and to work on crime prevention. Today, just under 50,000 people from nearly every area of Japanese society serve as volunteer probation officers (VPOs), alongside less than 800 paid probation officers working with approximately 60,000 people on probation or parole. Half of all VPOs have been involved for more than 10 years and their average age is 62 – a development that is causing some concern.

In this Voices from the Past, we learn the history of VPO activity and why the Japanese believe that social and community support for offenders' rehabilitation are necessary as part of effective crime prevention. Granted, they have been extremely successful; according to a Stanford University study, “Fewer than 4 percent of Japanese criminals who have been assigned to a volunteer officer will commit another crime within a year of their release on parole or probation.”  In addition, we explore what other countries have learned from this Japanese model of volunteer involvement, and briefly review the issues affecting the future of VPOs in Japan. 

Directors of volunteer programs tend to view volunteering from a management perspective, mainly because they're responsible for effectively managing people and resources. Volunteering, however, can be viewed from the perspective of other disciplines as well and this article is a useful reminder that looking at something from all directions is more enlightening than simply examining one.

Ethnology (the discipline, not the magazine of that name) is "the science which treats of races and people, and of their relations to one another, their distinctive physical and other characteristics." It is practiced by sociologists and anthropologists and you've probably been exposed to at least some of it through the works of people such as Margaret Mead. Ethnology tends to examine the relationships among individuals and their culture, with some emphasis on how people fit into that culture. One of the tenets of ethnology is that cultures tend to develop models of appropriate roles for its members, with some classic examples being the shaman, the warrior, the clan mother, etc.

Lynne Nakano's article examines volunteering in a residential neighborhood outside of Yokohama, Japan.