Countermeasures for the Problems of Lowering the Natural Age of Minors in Criminal Justice

The Ministry of Justice is pushing for a revision of the Criminal Law and Juvenile Law to lower the age of criminal minors from under 14 to under 13 to deal with 70 percent of criminal minors who have been protected due to intelligence, brutality, increased crime, and abuse of punishment. Academia is at odds with lowering the age of criminal minors, and lawyers' groups for a democratic society, the National Human Rights Commission of Korea, and the National Assembly Legislative Investigation Office are opposed. However, according to a survey of 3,506 adult men and women conducted by Media Real Research Korea in June 2022, 80.2% agreed. As such, most people express their approval for lowering the age of criminal minors. If the age of criminal minors is forced to be lowered at the request of the majority of the people, it should be implemented in a way to minimize the stigma damage caused by punishment. The stigma caused by criminal punishment makes it difficult to adapt to society, making it impossible to live a normal social life, making it impossible to break the vicious circle of crime and leading to recidivism. The ways to minimize stigma damage due to punishment are to postpone criminal records, exclude arrest investigations, suspend middle school graduation conditions, and implement vacation detention systems to prevent infringement of learning rights, and establish a third correctional facility to prevent recidivism.