Offender supervision in Europe: General trends and Serbian experience (original) (raw)
Related papers
COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF CRIME AND PENAL REACTION: SERBIA - EUROPE
SUMMARY Considering that Serbia didn`t take part in the Project of European comparison that resulted in publication of four books under the title European Sourcebook of Crime and Criminal Justice Statistics, the author has compared the data published in 2010. in the last of these books for more than 40 countries in Europe with the data collected by formal social control agencies in Serbia that are published in domestic and international records. In the research transversal strategy has been applied, the reference year is 2006, and the aim was comparison of reported and adjudicated crime like the reaction of formal social control system. However, the problem was the existence of three types of conceptually non-compliant records in Serbia: police-that contain data of committed crimes; judicial (prosecution and courts) that focus on the offender and finally the penitentiary records that are not compliant with domestic and international records. Even though these and other methodological and normative complications existed, the comparison made it possible to conclude the following: 1. The general rate of all detected crimes (criminal offences total) – 1 347 – compared with European mean and specillay in relation to the neighboring countries and the republics that formerly comprised the former Yugoslav federation – is not among the higher crime rates; however, the data show that several criminal activities in Serbia represent serious problem: violent crime – especially robbery (the rate of 50.6 is among the higher in Europe), corruption, drug offences (rate of 66.4) and other offences related to organized crime. On the other side, contrary to the image created by the media and to the public opinion, sexual crimes (including rape – rate is 2.4 – and sexual abuse of minors with the rate of 0.8) in comparative view are not a serious problem. The situation is similar with the major traffic offences (rate 36). 2. As for the type and severity of criminal sanctions, it is necessary to separate criminal procedures against adult offenders from criminal proceedings against juvenile offenders. The first category of offenders is usually (in the three-quarters of all cases – 77.1%) sentenced to imprisonment that is the main criminal sanction for crimes committed by adult offenders. The sentence of imprisonment is dominant in the Criminal Justice System and it`s alternatives have marginal position. In the same time, structure of imposed sentences shows that the most common are short sentences of imprisonment (65.3%) that last up to six months and this is the area that allows wide use of non-institutional measures. Courts in Serbia obviously do not use bifurcation in sentencing adult offenders – selection of criminal sanction in accordance with the criminal potential of the offender.
Tm-technisches Messen, 2020
Probation and parole are intended as alternatives to incarceration for eligible offenders. In various European jurisdictions research studies indicated the importance of the offenders’ perspective in supervision; however, the contribution of this factor is still unclear and underexplored. In the present study, we explored the offenders’ experience of the supervision process, based upon the experience of 22 convicts. To understand the offenders’ experience, we used the newly constructed tool, Eurobarometer, which measures eight core domains of offender supervision. The pilot study was conducted in Belgrade and was a part of the European Cooperation in Science and Technology initiative (COST) which was implemented in eight European jurisdictions. Results confirmed that the offenders’ perception of supervision can be significant in various domains of offenders’ life and that Eurobarometer can be significant in capturing that experience.
A New Legal Solution on Recidivism in Serbiаn Criminal Legislation
Nauka bezbednost policija
From the adoption of the Criminal Code in 2006 until the latest amendments of 2019, the Serbian criminal legislation treated recidivism as an optional aggravating circumstance, which had its specific legal status in comparison with other mitigating and aggravating circumstances. According to the new legal solution, instead of being optional, recidivism has become a mandatory aggravating circumstance, which together with clearly specified conditions for harsher penalties narrows down the possibility of free judicial decision-making when meting out punishment. The paper answers several questions: whether harsher penalties for recidivists are only the result of continuous tightening of repression at a normative level, whether and to what extent the criminal-law framework has been improved, and whether returning to some solutions, which were not normally applied in court practice, can be marked as approriate to achieve the desired degree of crime prevention. Final critical conculusion i...