On Oct. 26, the Ministry of Justice announced a holistic plan for prevention of juvenile crime, with the pivotal proposal of lowering the upper bound of the age of law breaching minors from 14 to 13. While the proposal still must go through the National Assembly to become law, it has already stirred up much attention. Under current law, criminal activity by underage youth is classified into three large categories. The youngest are 'law violating children', which are children of age 9 or less. They are regarded as being far too young to be bound by any official legal regulations and are hence free from legal punishments of all forms. Older youths of ages 14 to 18 are called ‘criminal youth’ and are by criminal law subject to criminal liability. While regulations prioritize protective detention over actual criminal punishment, criminal youth who have committed serious crimes are capable of being sentenced similarly to adults. 
 Between these two categories lay the problematic 'law breaching minors'. Originally defined as minors aged 10 to 13, they can be subject to protective detention but not criminal punishment. The new plan from the Ministry of Justice aims to further restrict the age spectrum from 10 to 12, thereby transferring minors aged 13 from law breaching minors to criminal youth and endowing them with criminal liability. This decision was made based on the activity of a 'law breaching minor age limit realization task force' that was formed and run by the Ministry of Justice from June to October.
 Law breaching minors have been the center of much debate for the past few years, as the criminal activity and pure shamelessness of teenagers that were duly aware of the fact of their nonliability to criminal punishments enraged the people. This led to public discourse that the age of law breaching minors should be lowered since minors of around 12 to 13 years of age are mostly capable of making decisions regarding what is right and wrong.
 The Ministry of Justice justified their plans by stating that (a) citizens need to be protected from the increasing violent crime by minors, (b) around 70% of all law breaching minors who have been subject to protective detention have been of age 13, and (c) 13 is the age that divides teenagers from elementary and middle school.
 According to the police, the number of law breaching minors transferred to the Juvenile Court due to violent crimes has increased from 6,286 cases in 2017 to 8,474 in 2021. Also, the number of law breaching minors transferred to the Juvenile Court due to violent crimes such as murder, armed robbery, rape, arson, etc. have been found to be as high as 35,390. Even law breaching minors that have committed murder cannot be convicted to anything higher than two years in Juvenile Reformatories and criminal records are not kept for such cases. Hence, there is a limit to which we can protect such underage criminals under the ideology that underage teenagers should be protected until maturity.
 On the other hand, there are arguments that the plans released by the Ministry of Justice are not effective measures to prevent criminal activity and go against the principle of rehabilitation of youths. The Citizen’s Solidarity for Human Rights, a domestic human rights organization, released a statement claiming that the new plans of the government were "typical populist agendas" with the "intention of increasing the investigative power of the prosecution by allocating even minor crimes under the control of the prosecution."
 Whatever the actual motivations of the new proposals may be, if it is to be realized, simply increasing the amount of punishment dished out to youths is not sufficient. Measures need to be taken to enhance infrastructure concerning the rehabilitation of criminal minors to reduce future repeat offenders. The Ministry of Justice has taken this into account, releasing plans to compartmentalize the dormitories of Juvenile Reformatories from 10 ~ 15 to 4 people per room. Also, they intend to increase the Juvenile Protectional Observation personnel and build a new teenager misconduct prevention center, among other plans. Whether such measures will be sufficient to reduce minor crime and reassure the public is yet to be seen.