On previous prison tours, we visited men's prisons, where the men's inmates were arrogant and full of fire.
Everyone must be curious, what kind of prisoners are inmates in women's prisons?
Today we will go into a women's prison in Japan to reveal the real life of female prisoners, many of them have committed felonies of homicide, but in this prison, the performance of female prisoners is unexpected, and then we will start this prison trip.
Wakayama Prison is the largest women's prison in Japan, where 485 female prisoners serve their sentences.
In the last 20 years, the number of female offenders in Japan has soared, what has caused these women to embark on the path of crime?
Perhaps through direct communication with them, we can find some answers.
After entering the prison gate, the first thing you pass is the reception room, which is generally used to receive family members who come to visit, and then directly enter the place where the prisoners live.
This is a building called the Observation Factory, so what to observe?
After the new prisoners enter the prison, they will spend 2 weeks teaching them how to live here, they will participate in the work here, the prison guards will observe them to see if they are good at handicrafts, or have any other good work, and then these prisoners will be assigned to different positions and undergo labor reform.
Prison guards will even confirm that prisoners are skilled at folding clothes.
Female prisoners who were good at tedious manual work were assigned to a formal factory where jobs awaited them.
When we entered the factory, we found that there were young girls and old ladies, and even foreign faces, and everyone was working quietly and disciplinedly.
If you want to go to the toilet here, you need to raise your hand to report it, and you can get up and act with the consent of the prison guards.
The female prisoners working here are like emotionless machines, without a hint of mood and sorrow.
The better-looking female prisoners are assigned to the laundry room to deal with items that need to be washed or have already been washed, which is a relatively heavy task.
After the morning work is completed, it will be lunch time, and the prisoners will have to cook their own meals and set up their own dishes.
The dish is also simple vegetables and sausages with rice, which is actually a mixture of rice and buckwheat.
And the amount of rice is also divided into three levels, people who work while standing can use large bowls, people who sit and work can use medium bowls, and those who have difficulty working or have no work can only get small bowls of rice.
At 4.20 p.m., the women prisoners returned to their respective cells after the day's work.
After work, the prisoners are relatively relaxed, and they can eat dinner in their cells, which are also typical of the Japanese style, which does not have a bed, but a whole piece of tatami mat.
Prisoners could relax and chat, and the corridors of the cells were filled with laughter and laughter.
After dinner, prisoners can do what they want, someone is reading, someone is writing a diary, and there is a TV in the cell.
At 9 p.m., the lights went out on time, and the normal day in the women's prison was over.
Early the next morning, prison guards conduct routine checks on each cell, mainly to make sure there are fewer people or if anyone is hiding prohibited items.
Today is an important day for the prison, it turns out that the two female prisoners' application for parole has been approved, and if the prisoners have performed well during their sentences, they can be released early after obtaining the parole permission from the prison.
The two prisoners were finally able to get out of prison, but they behaved very unnaturally, fearing that they had become disconnected from the outside world and could not reintegrate into society because of their long prison life.
This, combined with the sense of shame that comes with serving their sentences, makes them very uneasy before leaving prison.
After sending off the two prisoners, we went to the other side of the prison, in this barber shop in the prison, the personnel outside the prison can also come and go at will, and the people who cut the hair of the guests are the prisoners in the prison, which is also a kind of social service.
Haircuts are very cheap here, and these barber inmates are also very polite and friendly to customers, so this barbershop is very popular in this precinct, and customers here will not be prejudiced and discriminated against because the barber is a criminal, in their opinion these barbers are very good people.
One of these barbers, a young woman who was sentenced when she was 20 years old for illegal smuggling, has been in prison for more than 10 years, she started studying from 0 after entering prison, and now she has obtained a barber certificate.
The hairdresser said she likes things that are associated with beauty and likes to dress up beautifully, so she enjoys the process of dressing up others.
Women's feelings of guilt and shame are generally stronger, so most prisoners in this prison are reluctant to talk about their crimes.
On the morning of the third day, family members who came to visit would appear one after another outside the prison.
The couple usually visits once a month, the woman's mother, who is in her 80s, and the daughter wants to take her mother home for retirement after her mother is released from prison, but she also has a headache because it will attract criticism from neighbors.
In Japan, people are very concerned about the eyes of those around them.
Because of this, if the news of the mother's imprisonment reaches the daughter's company, the daughter may lose her job, so the daughter is now very distressed.
The female prisoner in her 40s has passed the parole application and will be released soon, she has been serving a 1 year and 2 months sentence here for drug abuse, and today the prison guard took the prisoner to the employment agency, in order to let her find a job as soon as possible after returning to society, so take her here to learn about recruitment information.
This prisoner was a nurse before going to prison, and now she wants to find a job like the same, after 1 year to get out of prison again, her first feeling is still uneasy, she is worried that she and the current society have a distance, after getting out of prison will be eliminated by society, but more is still excited, and the yearning for later life, most prisoners have this complicated mood before leaving prison.
Working in the prison barbershop today is a 50-something inmate with a 12-year sentence, a single mother who has been raising her two daughters to adulthood on insurance and government subsidies, and the prison walls ruthlessly separate her from her daughter.
After she said that after she was imprisoned, she also wanted to cut her daughters' hair and make them recognize their skills, which was also a kind of meager compensation.
With the end of the third day, our prison tour came to an end, and to our surprise, the prison here is not as chaotic as people think, and the prison guards and prisoners are not incompatible, and these prisoners who have committed various crimes are not vicious and difficult to get along with.
On the contrary, they are no different from women outside the prison, they also love beauty, like to talk about gossip, and are full of expectations and yearning for life, here is like a small society, prisoners here seriously live and work, hoping to one day return to society, hug their lovers and families.
At the end of the trip, the warden took us to a special place, where there is a sunflower planted by the prisoner's own hand, it grows strongly every day, and always faces the sun, it always reminds the prisoners in the prison to face life positively and try to live every day.
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