About 150 inmates serving life sentences have been granted parole over the past decade, according to government data. Nine out of 10 were violent offenders convicted of murder, yet the Ministry of Justice does not track whether they have reoffended.
Data obtained from the Ministry of Justice by the office of Rep. Seo Young-kyo of the Democratic Party of Korea, a member of the National Assembly's Legislation and Judiciary Committee, showed on the 15th that 151 inmates serving life sentences were granted parole between 2017 and September this year.
By type of crime, 144 of them, or 95% of the total, had committed violent offenses including murder, robbery-murder, killing a lineal ascendant and rape-murder. Five were convicted of causing death during a robbery, while one each was convicted of attempted robbery-murder and attempted murder.
By year, the figures were 11 in 2017, 40 in 2018, 14 in 2019, 18 in 2020, 17 in 2021, 16 in 2022, 12 in 2023, one in 2024 and nine in 2025. As of September this year, 13 had been granted parole. All 13 had been convicted of murder.
Under Article 72 of the Criminal Act, inmates sentenced to life imprisonment become eligible for parole after serving at least 20 years, subject to certain conditions. While a substantial number of violent offenders have been released on parole, the ministry does not separately track their reoffending.
"There is no separate data on reoffending by paroled life-sentence inmates. We only compile the reincarceration rate for all parolees," a ministry official said. According to the reincarceration figures the ministry submitted to Seo's office, the rate was 7.3% in 2018, 6.8% in 2019, 6.2% in 2020, 5.9% in 2021 and 7.4% in 2022.
Calls Grow to End Parole for Life Sentences
Amid a string of violent crimes — including the killing of a mother-in-law and abduction of a wife in Seoul's Songpa District and a random knife attack in Incheon — calls have grown louder for South Korea to introduce life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
The 13th Criminal Division of the Gwangju District Court, which recently sentenced Jang Yun-gi to life in prison for the murder of a high school student, said that "never allowing parole for as long as the defendant lives and strictly enforcing the life sentence is the only way to offer even a small measure of comfort to the victim and her family, and to prevent similar crimes from recurring."
Earlier, an appellate court that sentenced Kim Tae-hyun to life in prison for the 2021 killing of a mother and her two daughters in Seoul's Nowon District said parole "should not be permitted." A trial court that in 2023 sentenced Choi Won-jong to life in prison over a knife attack in the Bundang area of Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, that left 14 people dead or injured also proposed ways to restrict parole.
In 2023, as random knife attacks on the public mounted, the ministry submitted a bill to revise the Criminal Act to introduce life imprisonment without parole, but it was scrapped when the term of the 21st National Assembly expired.
Seo introduced her own bill in September 2024 to create a sentence of life imprisonment without parole, aiming to address gaps in the criminal justice system. "Violent crime must be met with correspondingly severe punishment," she said. "Offenders whose crimes are heinous and who show little prospect of rehabilitation need to be permanently separated from society."
South Korea has not carried out an execution in 30 years, since 23 inmates including members of the Jijonpa crime ring were put to death on Dec. 30, 1997, the final year of the Kim Young-sam administration. Amnesty International has classified the country as abolitionist in practice since 2007. Against that backdrop, calls have persisted to bar life-sentence inmates from parole altogether and keep them separated from society.