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10 Punishment & Soc'y 5 (2008)

handle is hein.journals/punscty10 and id is 1 raw text is: Copyright 0 SAGE Publications Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore. www.sagepublications.com 1462-4745; Vol 10(1): 5-8 DOI: 10.1177/1462474507084194 PUNISHMENT & SOCIETY Politics and punishment in the PRC and Japan An introduction to the mini-symposium on East Asia SETSUO MIYAZAWA Aoyama Gakuin University, Japan This mini-symposium on East Asia includes three articles: one provides a glimpse of the Chinese criminal justice system; the two others provide a broad view of Japanese criminal justice policies. Yi, a Chinese law professor, focuses on arrest and pretrial detention in the People's Republic of China (PRC). Yi explains that the PRC's 1996 Criminal Procedure Law (CPL) requires, in addition to evidence of the crime in question, two conditions for arrest: (1) the crime must be punishable at least by imprisonment; (2) arrest must be necessary to prevent the person arrested from either endangering the community or fleeing to avoid trial. The arresting authority obtains approval for arrest from the prosecutor's office, not the court. Once arrest is approved, pretrial detention can last up to two months. Yi informs us that arrest approvals are routine: permission rates approach 90 per cent. Although Yi does not provide statistics about suspects investigated without arrest, he indicates that almost all prosecuted defendants have been detained before trial. He also cites a study which shows that 22 per cent of arrested/detained suspects were released without trial.' Yi sees serious abuse in this practice: arrest is used as punishment in order to deter potential criminals and to appease injured victims, so that the public arrest of suspects often serves as propaganda. Yi offers three explanations for such abuse: (1) criminal justice officials lack proper understanding of the legal conditions for arrest; (2) local government officials exert influence over prosecutors' decisions regarding arrests in the interests of anti-crime campaigns; (3) the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), whose political legitimacy rests on economic development and social security, is thus compelled to promote a crime control approach to criminal justice policies. According to Yi, most Chinese scholars of criminal procedure favor a transferral of the power to approve arrest and detention from the prosecutor's office to the court. Yi

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