Iran's Judicial Criminal Policy on Alternatives to Imprisonment

The Iranian legislator seeking to avoid harms of imprisonment and prison, through enacting the Islamic Penal Code in 2013, established new criminal concepts and dedicated a chapter to alternatives to imprisonment. But these changes that reflect the legislative criminal policy, alone were not enough, and in order to achieve the result, the judicial criminal policy must also be coordinated with the new legislature's view. For the research to be applicable, the acquired sentences have been analyzed to demonstrate how legislative criminal policy has influenced judicial criminal policy. The findings of this study indicate that Iran's judicial criminal policy in relation to imprisonment's alternatives, currently has a significant bias from legislative criminal policy. Such responses apply only to 6.5% of all cases which are eligible to receive alternatives of imprisonment. Analyzing the issued sentences demonstrates that some important variables such as the type of crime, age, gender, occupational and marital status of the perpetrators have not been accounted adequately; As such about three quarters of the sentences have allocated to fines alone (87 of 150 sentences).This fact can be attributed, first of all, to the lack of proper understanding of judges about the importance, necessity and goals of alternatives to imprisonment, as well as executive problems and hardware deficiencies.