At the Okazaki medical prison, three inmates sit on mats and follow simple instructions: inhale, exhale slowly, pay attention to the body. About forty minutes — yoga, breathing exercises and meditation.
This scene took place on 22 December 2025 as part of a two-month experimental mindfulness programme led by Takuro Tanimoto, an associate professor at Bukkyo University in Kyoto. According to Kyodo News, it was the first such project in a Japanese medical prison.
One of the participants said that he used to turn to the staff for help in moments of anxiety, but after learning the breathing practice he discovered that he was sometimes able to calm himself down and get through a difficult moment on his own.
At first glance, it is a very small story. But it is unfolding against the backdrop of far more serious changes.
On 1 June 2025, Japan carried out the largest reform of its penal system in more than a century. The previous categories of imprisonment with compulsory labour and without it were merged into a new system of confinement, under which work, education and correctional programmes can be selected with regard to the characteristics of the individual.
The aim of the reform is not only to carry out punishment, but also to reduce the risk of reoffending and to prepare a person for return to society.
And here mindfulness practice turned out to be unexpectedly apt.
Its task is not to make a person “think about nothing”. The practice teaches one to notice arising thoughts, bodily sensations and emotions without automatically turning each of them into action.
A small space appears between impulse and reaction. And sometimes it was precisely this space that was missing before.
Scientific data give grounds to take such an approach seriously, though without exaggeration. An analysis of several studies of meditation programmes among prisoners showed a reduction in stress levels, depressive manifestations and general psychological tension. However, the quality of the studies varies, and there is not yet enough evidence that meditation by itself can noticeably reduce the likelihood of reoffending.
There is another interesting layer to this story — interoception, that is, the ability to notice signals from one’s own body.
Studies show that mindfulness practice can improve the subjective perception of internal states. A person begins to notice breathing, tension in the body, heartbeat and changes in emotional state better.
This allows a different look at the well-known metaphor of meditation. Usually we seem to be inside the river of our own emotions. The current carries us along, and sometimes we do not even notice the moment when anxiety turns into a reaction and anger into action. The practice does not stop the river. It can teach us sometimes to step onto the bank and see the current from the outside.
Modern theories of predictive processing and active inference attempt to explain such changes through a restructuring of attention to internal signals and through a change in the meaning the brain assigns to its own expectations, sensations and prediction errors.
But for now these are precisely scientific models that help formulate hypotheses, rather than a definitively established mechanism of meditation’s action.
And this is perhaps the most interesting thing about the Okazaki experiment. It does not yet prove that meditation prevents reoffending. Nor does it show that a few weeks of practice can radically change a person’s personality.
But it tests a more modest — and possibly more important — idea: can a person be taught to notice his own internal state before it turns into action?
Physical freedom in prison is limited by walls. But the ability to observe one’s own thoughts, feelings and impulses is a completely different form of freedom.
And it is precisely this that Japan is now trying to incorporate into its rehabilitation system.
