Crime and Criminal Justice in South Korea: Editor’s Introduction

As compared to the well-known success stories of South Korea in the areas of economic development, technology, education, and culture, topics in crime and criminal justice in South Korea are still relatively unknown to the world community. This might be the result of two major factors: the relative paucity of peer-reviewed journal articles and other publications published in English on crime and criminal justice in South Korea and the scarcity of large and systematic data sources available for empirical research. Considering the fact that the majority of previous studies in criminology and criminal justice were based on Western or American samples, it is not certain if the empirical findings from Western societies can be directly applied to non-Western Asian countries, which have different values, cultures, and social structures. Therefore, this special issue expands the scope of the Western-driven previous literature by introducing six cross-cultural empirical studies regarding some of the major crime and criminal justice issues in South Korea using empirical data collected there. This introduction to this special issue provides a preliminary overview of the six articles, two of which focus on police stressors, job satisfaction, and police officers’ turnover intention. The other articles look at police officer’s attitudes toward the use of force, household crime victimization, dynamics of the victim-perpetrator relationship in child sexual abuse, and the correlates of recidivism among juvenile offenders.