엄벌주의와 범죄예방 -아동 성범죄의 사례- = Harsh Punishment and Crime Prevention

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This essay aims to analyze the recent tendency towards harsh punishment in Korea, especially in the cases of the sexual assaults against children. Since 2008, Korean legislative, as the U.S. and some European countries, has not only increased the amount of punishment but introduced new kinds of treatment for preventing crime. This change has occurred mainly because of the sexual crime against children, particularly some notorious cases in those days. This essay, however, asserts that these crimes was extorted in nature and exaggerated by media highlighting the mental abnormalities of the criminals and the cruel acts against weak children. In addition, this essay points to ``social security discourse`` and ``penal populism`` as the other causes of making punishment harsher. The former replaces the ordinary unstableness in neo-liberal global economy with private individual security against crime and the latter makes the politician react to general public opinion promptly without considering the role of criminal justice experts. On the other hand, there are some doubts about the efficiency of the new security treatments. Notification registry, electronic surveillance and chemical castration, still, have not proved their capacity to prevent crimes. Furthermore, those treatments entail not just considerable financial cost but social and legal opportunity cost like the impairment of human rights of criminals and the extension of social surveillance net. This essay, therefore, proposes more effective and cheaper alternative for preventing sexual crimes against children. That is the expansion of ``social care service`` for the children who have to be alone in most day times and the ``education of sexual crime prevention`` at schools.