Recent heinous crimes have prompted the Justice Ministry to plan mandatory rehabilitation programs in prisons in a bid to stem repeat criminal offenses.

To achieve these difficult but much-called-for programs, the ministry will submit a bill to amend the Prison Law in the regular Diet session that convenes this week, ministry officials said.

Tomoyuki Yokota, head of the ministry's Correction Bureau, informed Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of the plan.

It includes a program for sex-crime offenders to be drawn up with the help of public and private mental-health professionals.

``We anticipate a difficult task ahead in deciding what steps to include in each program, such as those for rapists and sexual abuse offenders,'' a senior Correction Bureau official said.

Experts and the public have called for programs to help prevent repeat sex offenses since the November abduction and slaying of an elementary schoolgirl in Nara Prefecture.

The suspect in the case has a record of molesting young girls and served a sentence for the attempted murder of another girl.

Prisons around the country currently provide instructions and guidance to inmates to prevent repeat offenses, depending on the types of crimes and the prisoner circumstances. The programs, for example, help inmates kick drug addiction or leave crime syndicates.

But such programs are not compulsory. If passed, the bill would make them mandatory for prisoners, subjecting those who refuse without good reasons to punishment.

Thirteen of the nation's 74 prisons currently offer programs for sex offenders. Only 125 of the 3,090 inmates convicted of sex crimes as of the end of 2004 underwent the programs, which are usually held one to four times a month for about an hour. The programs last two to eight months.

Justice Ministry officials said prisons are experimenting with various rehabilitation programs for their inmates.(IHT/Asahi: January 19,2005)