An Analysis of the Semi-Liberal System in the Criminal Law of Iran and France: With an Approach toward its Jurisprudential Foundations

The semi-liberal system is one of the institutions providing the opportunity of social activities for the prisoners to work outside the prison in order to reduce the harmful effects of imprisonment and facilitate the effective return to society after spending their conviction period. Despite the fact that the origin of the institution traces back to the system of gradual or Irish imprisonment in France, its adoption in line with the principle of applying the minimum imprisonment in the Islamic criminal law on the one hand, and its conformity with the doctrine of the religious teachings regarding the opportunity to work out of the prison on the other, provoked the legislator in 2013 to establish this French institution in the penal code of the country. In the present paper, through a descriptive-analytic method, it is attempted to study the status of the semi-liberal system in two systems of Iranian and French criminal law concurrently in order to identify the advantages and disadvantages of each one by means of demonstrating the existing similarities and differences.