Growth of Felonies after the 1997 Financial Crisis in Korea

The Korean economy successfully overcame the macroeconomic downturns driven from the Asian financial crisis in a very short period of time. The economic shock, however, generated a variety of social problems, one of which was the increase in felonies (homicides, robbery, rape, and arson), or degradation of public safety. We argue that the Korean criminal policy has not been effective to ameliorate the rising trends in crime caused by the financial crisis. In order to substantiate this claim, we assess the effectiveness of criminal policy: policing, sentencing, and corrections. First, there has been resource shortage in policing since the 1997 financial crisis. For the past ten years, the investment of human resource and budget in the police has been virtually stagnant, as well as in prosecutors’ investigation activities. The insufficient resource allocation in policing caused a huge decline in arrest rates and prosecution rates. Second, the Korean judicial system has not increased the severity of punishment. Comparing the pre- and the post-financial crisis period, the average length of prison sentence by the courts has declined. Given the degrading in the quality of crime and the decreasing amount of inputs into the policing and prosecution, the government should have increased the severity of punishment to deter crime. Third, we found that the government hired more officers and allocated larger budget into prison and probation. However, it is difficult to suggest that the increased level of resources in correctional programs have been effective in preventing released prisoners from committing future crimes. This is because the number of repeat offenders convicted of more than a third offense increased dramatically since 1997, pushing felonies upward. In sum, the government organizations failed to respond respectively or to make coordinated actions, eventually causing a dramatic increase in crimes. This research brings explicit policy implications. In order to prevent possible additional degradation of public safety, the government must put more efforts into increasing the effectiveness of policy and to investing more resources into said policies. We also emphasize the importance of the institutional mechanisms which foster policy coordination among the Police, the Prosecutor’s Office, the Ministry of Justice, and other relevant government organizations