Review article
Conditional Release in the Perspective of Modern Croatian Legislation and the Criminal Justice Practice of the Probation Service
Zdenka Kokić-Puce
; Ministarstvo pravosuđa RH, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Goran Brkić
; Ministarstvo pravosuđa RH, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Snježana Maloić
; Ministarstvo pravosuđa RH, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Abstract
The possibility of c onditional release is available in many European countries. The importance of this institute is also supported by European recommendations indicating that conditional release is one of the most effective and constructive ways of achieving the social reintegration of prisoners and for the prevention of recidivism. It is an important measure of penitentiary law and one of the most important mechanisms of modern penological practice, especially in terms of achieving a participatory approach to the execution of prison sentences. The fi rst part of the paper presents one kind of reform of this mechanism achieved through the recent reform of general criminal sanctions in Croatia, through a comparative analysis of previous and current legal provisions. With respect to European recommendations, one of the tasks of the Croatian legislation was to introduce supervision by the probation service into the institute of conditional release. Consequently, the second part of the paper presents an overview of the adoption and changes of the legal regulations, the organisation and development of the probation service, and the current modalities of the involvement of the probation service in conditional release cases, with an analysis of some characteristics of conditional release and its population ordered into probation supervision. The research analysed the documentation of the probation service of 6,176 conditional release cases, which were executed from 2013 to 2019. Apart from the respectable number of conditional release decisions and the intention of the Croatian legislator to continuously harmonise domestic with the latest European legislation, this paper also shows the importance of interventions aimed at the social reintegration of prisoners which are additionally provided through the established probation service, as well as the importance of evaluating domestic executive criminal law practice and of conducting further research.
Keywords
conditional release; court; enforcement judge; prison; prison sentence; probation
Hrčak ID:
253332
URI
Publication date:
14.12.2020.
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