조직범죄에 대한 대응방안과 그 한계

Recently the problem of organized crime is getting worse than ever before. Many criminal organizations flourish in diverse fields and some of them become global. It is main obligation of government to prevent and combat organized crime. In Korea, it is forbidden to constitute and/or join criminal organization by the Criminal Act. Certain crimes committed by the member of criminal organization are subjected to enhanced penalties and instigating organized crime shall be punished with harsher sentence. And forfeiture of criminal proceeds and criminalization of money laundering are essential to uproot organized crime. Moreover the methods such as entrapment, wiretapping, account tracing and so on are broadly allowed for investigating organized crime. It is very important to protect the reporters of organized crime from retaliation. So restricting bail of suspect, concealing witness' identity, videotaping of testimony are introduced in relation with some violent crimes. The criminal justice agencies are able to propose some kinds of merits including mitigation of sentence, suspension of prosecution and so on for the purpose of inducing a member of criminal band to betray his organization. Also it is recommendable to introduce immunity and plea bargaining under strict conditions. Although there are lots of countermeasures against organized crime in law, some of them are not available in reality because competing values such as due process of law and fundamental rights of individual should be preserved. And conflicts among the criminal justice agencies make it difficult to use them properly. The biggest obstacle may be corruption, which is probably more deleterious to society than any other harm produced by criminal organizations.