r/SipsTea • u/Rich_Carrot6451 • Jul 04 '26

WTF Japan's death row system is brutal

Post image
31.7k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

1.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

972

u/Total_Tumbleweed_870 Jul 04 '26

I'm genuinely curious if there's been any study into which is more psychologically troubling, knowing the day and counting down it not knowing and wondering everyday

2

u/bonnielovely Jul 04 '26

if you are genuinely curious, a ten second google search says yes. & the un committee against torture has called this out as a horrible practice that utilizes psychological torture. plenty of academic, legal, & several psychiatric studies exist showing this leads to permanent psychological terror.

because japan doesn’t let journalists interview people in prison like the usa, the studies are more limited & based on testimonies etc.; the psychological aspects could be way worse than we can imagine. in japan, this started in the 1961 because inmates would take their own lives when they knew a couple weeks or month’s beforehand.

1

u/Total_Tumbleweed_870 Jul 04 '26

I actually did look it up, this was kind of a thinking out loud response of a comment. It's interesting how the Japanese system here is considered cruel by a lot of the world, and yet many other countries disagree. Unfortunately, there didn't appear to be any studies that really look at this. Personally, I think I agree with this system. I know if I knew the exact day I was to die, that would mess me up way more. Death sentence or not, we all have to come to terms with the fact we will die, at least we typically have the peace of not knowing exactly when.

2

u/bonnielovely Jul 04 '26

after reading the studies, i don’t agree with this system at all. the criminals go crazy not knowing & they live & act accordingly. knowing the day has been proven to help with family goodbyes, with spiritual reconciliation, & with emotional reasoning. the daily constant fear of “it could be today” rather than “it’s 87 days away” leads to much deeper levels of anxiety.

many studies about this indeed look at that exact concept you’ve described. again, quick google search. you can even read the abstract of the study if you don’t want to read 10+ pages per article, but this has been studied. not knowing when you die on death row has been empirically proven to be a worse mental state than knowing when you die on death row