Research On Light Punishment For Economic Crime

There have been eight amendments since the current criminal law be promulgated in1997,and economic crime is always the focus of the amendments, the specification of the market economic order, especially the order of the financial and securities markets is the most concerned problem. Even though the amendments increased some economic crimes, and some crimes are sentenced with heavier penalty, the general trend is still unable to conceal.Up from the historical retrospective, economic crime of primitive forms always exist. Compared to other conventional types of crime, economic crime is still a relatively new type of crime, its occurrence and development is inseparable from economic environment. Just like people will get ill, in the process of economic growing, economic crime is an institutional and unavoidable tumor. With the growing prosperity of China’s economy, economic crime is also rapidly increasing, the amount of money involved, the number of participants and the degree of hazardous is seriously impacting people’s life.To set severe penalties for economic crime is becoming a growing need.To analyze from China’s historical origin of heavy penalty, punish economic crimes strictly and severely has become the basic attitude of China. However, the simple misdemeanors doctrine is not appropriate in dealing with new type of crime such as economic crime. The reason is not only the misdemeanors doctrine ignores the protection of human rights, but also it is proved that misdemeanors can’t effectively fight against economic crime. Criminal law becomes useless and thankless, what’s more, judicial resources are wasted, and the result was unsatisfactory. Such status compels us to re-examine our policy and instruments of economic crime.In view of this, some countries have begun to take some new measures, because of the differences of the individual national conditions, we can’t copy them, but it’s sure that they worth learning. Light punishment is overall trend of most types of crime, we have to face it and bring it to practice step by step. How to change the way of thinking, how to set a reasonable penalty system, this is the focus of the paper. The paper is divided into four parts:The first part is an overview of the light punishment for economic crimes. The definition and the characteristics of economic crime are elaborated here. There are three representative views in theory, namely the macro concept, the moderate concept and the micro concept. In order to discuss under a unified and accurate premise, this paper take the micro concept, that is to say, the "economic crime" talked about in this paper specifically refers to the crimes of destructing the socialist market economic. This part is also a full presentation of light punishment. With the help of horizontal comparisons and longitudinal analysis, combining with the cultural and economical background of ancient times and other countries, we get a conclusion of how light punishment develops. At the same time, by analyzing the cultural origins of China, this paper introduces the situation of light punishment in China.The Second part is a comprehensive description of China’s eight criminal law amendments, except Amendment Two, from the first amendment to the eighth one, economic crime is always the main topic, this has fully demonstrated that our country pays much attention to economic crimes. From the previous modifications, the trend of light punishment has begun to spread gradually in the field of economic crime in China.The third part analyzes the present situation and defects of China’s penalty system of economic crime. From the criminal policy and legislative changes about economic crime, we summarized the status quo of China’s economic crime penalty system.The fourth part is the emphasis of this paper. The necessity and the realization measures of light punishment are discussed here:gradually improve the imperfect legislation and penalty system, prudently use the death penalty and life imprisonment, improve the probation and parole provisional release, eliminate the misdemeanors doctrine from people’s mind, and protect human rights at a higher level.