The Operational and Judicial Challenges of Decarceration in Iranian Criminal Policy

Criminologists have long used every opportunity to warn criminal policymakers about the adverse health, criminological, moral and social consequences of incarceration. In our country, however, considering the abovementioned costs and adverse effects, decarceration has been given priority, especially for minor crimes and criminals without a criminal record; but its implementation in practice faces several judicial and operational challenges. In this paper, the judicial and operational challenges of decarceration are examined in the light of court rulings, using an analytical-descriptive method.The obtained findings indicate that the most important identified challenges are frequency of criminal cases, sustainable incarceration oriented culture among judges, lack of proper infrastructure, unprepared accepting bodies and the society incarceration-centered public culture, respectively. Some of the proposed solutions to cope with the current situation are: changing the culture of incarceration among judges by providing proportionate execution guarantee; increasing the supreme judicial authority’s attention to the equipment needed to implement this policy in such a way that the statistics oriented procedure of the judiciary do not distort the decarceration policy; monitoring the performance of judges in terms of adherence to macro-judicial policies in the field of community-based punishments; real and continuous monitoring of how to file Personality Record; improving the level of knowledge of judges by holding continuous training courses; upgrading the level of hardware and software facilities for applying non-custodial sentences and increasing the awareness of relevant institutions, regarding their rights and duties and reforming the culture of public punishment.