A Study on the Effectiveness of Arbitrary Sentence Reduction of for Hostage Crimes: Focusing on legal and economic discussions
Authors: Ryu Dagyum , Yoon Eunpa , Lee Kyung-Lyul ,   Korean Association of Victimology
Published: May 2023

In order to protect the life and safety of hostages in hostage-taking crimes, Criminal Law stipulates provisions for reducing the sentence in Articles 295-2 and 324-6. The purpose of the regulation is to deter secondary crime against hostages as an incentive for actors to safely release hostages. However, it is somewhat questionable whether the preferential treatment of criminal policy at the level of arbitrary mitigation is an effective motive for the hostage offenders to safely release the hostage. Accordingly, using the sequential game model of game theory, this study analyzes what selective strategies are carried out under the interdependence between hostage criminals and law enforcement authorities.

In the game model, the compensation vector of each participant used Becker's equation of criminal utility theory. First, the strategic choices of hostage offenders, law enforcement authorities, the general public, and law enforcement authorities were examined separately to derive the limit and general deterrence effects of the hostage release reduction regulations respectively. In addition, in the strategic choice analysis between hostage offenders and law enforcement authorities, the tendency of hostage offenders was divided into risk avoidance, risk neutrality, and risk preference type, and in each case, the hostage offender made a choice between necessary reduction or arbitrary reduction. In order to promote the safety of hostages, necessary reduction or exemption was found to be the most effective incentive. However, it should be noted that this result may give the wrong signal as an incentive for hostage crimes to the general public, who are potential criminals.

Furthermore, this study also examines the possible improvements of the current liberation reduction regulations by reflecting the golden time in relation to the age of hostages. Given that the purpose of the liberation and mitigation regulations is to protect the lives and security of hostages, it is highly likely that the law enforcement authorities' attempts to negotiate after the golden time will be meaningless. It was confirmed that the golden time, which can guarantee the safety of the hostages, has a large time difference depending on the age of the hostages. As a result, in order to ensure the safety of hostages and to ensure the fair exercise of national punishment rights, the temporal application of the liberation and mitigation regulations should be more precisely defined by reflecting the golden time. In order to safely release hostages within the period by applying the golden time, the average time after victims are robbed and attracted, the need to define greater incentives for compensation than the current arbitrary reduction should be considered.

Finally, this study suggests that the method of statistics collection and crime analysis on hostage crimes needs to be completely reorganized as a premise to reflect the difference in golden time in legislation.