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Disadvantaged Minor-Offense Project

Vulnerable individuals often lack legal literacy or struggle to access social welfare resources. Consequently, there are numerous cases where vulnerable people inadvertently pick up someone else's belongings or commit theft out of a desperate need for sustenance, effectively trading freedom for three meals a day in prison. This situation has indirectly contributed to a continuous rise in the number of inmates over the age of 60. However, imprisoning vulnerable citizens in this manner not only fails to achieve the objective of preventing recidivism, but also wastes judicial resources.

According to the Judicial Yuan's 2020 Annual Report, the number of concluded theft cases in Taiwan reached 20,878. Among these, there were 49 cases resulting in exemption from punishment. Of the judgments granting exemption from punishment, 21 explicitly mentioned that the perpetrator belonged to a low-income household, lower-middle-income household, impoverished family, or had family members with mental disabilities or intellectual deficits (hereinafter referred to as "vulnerable defendants"). This accounted for 42% of the year's exemption cases, with zero acquittals among them.

A detailed analysis of the aforementioned 21 exemption cases reveals that judges were willing to grant exemptions primarily because the stolen items were of negligible value and lacked significance under criminal law. Furthermore, owing to the perpetrators' vulnerable circumstances, judges deemed the enforcement of criminal penalties inappropriate, thereby preventing their family situations from deteriorating further due to imprisonment or community service in lieu of imprisonment.

If we search the Judicial Yuan's Judgment System using keywords such as "lacking criminal significance" and "negligible value" (or "minimal value") for the same year (hereinafter referred to as "petty theft cases"), we find that there were over 1,600 theft cases nationwide. Among these, as many as 173 cases involved vulnerable perpetrators, accounting for approximately 10% of the year's petty theft cases. Yet, only 21 of these vulnerable perpetrators (12%) received exemptions from punishment. Conversely, 88% of vulnerable perpetrators were still required to take responsibility for their actions through community service or imprisonment.

However, sending vulnerable perpetrators to prison evidently does not help fundamentally resolve the root causes of their crimes, and may even worsen the defendants' plight. How the courts and prosecutors' offices should address the circumstances of vulnerable defendants and provide substantive assistance within the current legal framework—or whether the conditions for sentence exemption or suspension of prosecution should be revised to make regulations more workable—requires concerted brainstorming from all sectors of society.