Criminal justice participation among Japanese adults: A preliminary study

Who participates in criminal justice? An exploratory study in Japan

“…This omission limits the study's relevance for two reasons. Empirically, demographic variables (except gender) were not related to CJP (Mukai et al, 2023). Considering this, the factors that do explain the variance in CJP experience and intention remain largely unexamined and need to be complemented by future studies.…”

“…Drawing on these studies, Mukai et al (2023) presented the concept of CJP and their preliminary findings. Adopting Verba et al's (1995) definition of political participation, they defined CJP as an "activity that is intended to or has the consequence of affecting, either directly or indirectly, the action of the criminal justice system" (p. 3).…”

“…Among the social movements covered by these items is an online petition to reform the law on sexual violence in Japan (Change.org, 2019), which gathered about 15,000 signatures. Mukai et al (2023) conducted a survey in the Japanese context to examine (1) how many people have experience participating in and intention to participate in criminal justice and (2) whether experiences and intentions are related to respondents' demographic characteristics. Regarding the first question, they found that participants' experiences and intentions were generally low; specifically, only 10.5% (95%CI [8.4%, 12.6%]) of their participants had experienced at least one form of CJP.…”

“…Experience was measured using the items contained in Mukai et al's (2023) study. In addition to constructing the measure, Mukai et al (2023) conducted a supplemental analysis and showed that only 29 out of 848 respondents reported CJP experiences that were not covered by the items. Consequently, the items in the previous study were deemed appropriately comprehensive.…”

“…In this context, Mukai et al (2023) coined the concept of criminal justice participation (CJP) based on the well-established concept of political participation (Verba et al, 1995) and conducted an empirical study in the Japanese context. They showed that the Japanese public's experience and intention to participate in criminal justice is low, and experience and intention are generally independent of respondents' demographic characteristics.…”