When lay judges hand down a prison term, many focus on the merits of the case itself and not about the life behind bars that awaits the guilty.
One group of citizens who served as lay judges in criminal trials, however, took a tour of Yokohama Prison in late May to get a firsthand look at how the correctional system works.
"When we were deciding on the prison term of the defendant, I thought hard about what was just, but I didn't know what awaited him when his sentence was finalized," said Atsutoshi Oda, a company employee in his 40s who helped decide a case at the Tokyo District Court in 2010.