후기산업사회의 문화적 성격과 형사정책의 발전방향

Criminal justice policies in Korea have much developed during the past several decades: Numbers of facilities and personnels working for criminal justice system have greatly increased and criminal cases have become administered more professionally. However, evaluative results are opposite to such developments. Public perceptions on the credibilities of criminal justice institutions have gradually deteriorated, recidivism rates have increased year after year, and criminal victims have expressed higher levels of frustration and displeasure. It is not easy to understand the increased levels of negative evaluations, especially when the apparent organizational and administrative achievements are considered. This anomaly can be explained by two different perspectives. Functional perspective points the malfunctions of existing policies as principal causes leading to the negative evaluations. This traditional perspective assures us that innovative measures, which are to be either newly devised or deliberately modified from the previous policies, will successfully handle the current problems. Meanwhile, another perspective named as the philosophy of the limit concerns the internal limits of law positivism. Proponents of the limit philosophy argue that social environments have changed in the era of late industrialization and the existing policies derived from legal positivism are not adequate to process criminal cases in the changed environments. In this paper the philosophy of the limit is adopted as an analytical framework to examine the current problems. Several internal limits of existing criminal policies are discussed. It is noted that the integrity and the fairness of criminal justice system are hard to maintain in postmodernism. Also, the policies are shown to be unfit to the general features of actors encountered in everyday practices of criminal justice institutions. This is so because offenders, criminal victims, and general citizens are likely to be morally emotive. This paper concludes that criminal justice policies in postmodernism should try to incorporate an idea of jouissance actor, interactional skills for story-telling, and restorative justice.