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Punishment in Slovenia: Seventy Years of Penal Policy Development

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Abstract

This paper focuses on a comprehensive study of penal policy in Slovenia in the last 70 years, providing an analysis of statistical data on crime, conviction, and prison populations. After a sharp political and penal repression in the first years after World War II, penal and prison policy began paving the way to a unique “welfare sanction system”, grounded in ideas of prisoners’ treatment. After democratic reforms in the early 1990s, the criminal legislation became harsher, but Slovenia managed to avoid the general punitive trends characterized by the era of penal state and culture of control. The authoritarian socialist regime at its final stage had supported the humanization of the penal system, and this trend continued in the first years of the democratic reforms in the 1990s, but it lost its momentum after 2000. In the following two decades, Slovenia experienced a continuous harshening of criminal law and sanctions on the one hand and an increasing prison population rate on the other. From 2014 onwards, however, there was a decrease in all segments of penal statistics. The findings of the study emphasize the exceptionalism of Slovenian penal policy, characterized by penal moderation, which is the product of the specific local historical, political, economic, and normative developments.

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Notes

  1. In all honesty, countries with socialist past have a rich tradition of penal policy research; however, most of it is in native languages, which are not well known in the “West”. Nevertheless, some authors (e.g. Dünkel, 2013; Krajewski, 2013, 2014; Šelih & Završnik, 2012; Valkova & Hulmakova, 2007) from Central and Eastern Europe published important works on penal policy in former socialist countries in the English language.

  2. The “Third Way” of Yugoslav socialism was grounded on the proclamation of workers’ self–management, which drew upon the ideas of a democratic left that went beyond the conservative social democracy of the West and the bureaucratized “state socialism”. Also inseparably bound up with the “Yugoslav experiment” were the local people’s councils, revolutionary administrative bodies intended to form the basis of a socialist model of direct democracy, both in the political system and economy (Kanzleiter, 2011).

  3. In post–war Yugoslavia, as a result of development in the first half of the twentieth century, two different types of economy were formed. The northern, more developed areas of Slovenia and Croatia, which were in transition from agrarian to industrial structure, created the necessary basic conditions for industrialization. In contrast, the rest of the country was predominantly agricultural areas with little industry and a predominantly peasant population (Borak, 2002; Čobeljić, 1975).

  4. The development of unique resocialisation and rehabilitation practices in penal institutions was influenced by the advent of modern Slovene criminology and criminological experimentation replacing criminological positivism of the early period (Petrovec & Muršič, 2011).

  5. Šelih (2012, p. 29) argues that its proximity to several Western countries made it easy for Slovenia to become familiar with Western criminology and crime policies, which led to the import of criminal justice policies adhering to Western standards of the rule of law and human rights. From today’s perspective, it seems that the human rights agenda in Slovenia and some other post–socialist countries gathered strength at the very moment when it was already losing its power in Western democracies.

  6. In Slovenia, objectives and priorities of crime policy are defined in the Resolution on the national programme for the prevention and suppression of crime 2019–2023 (2019).

  7. At the beginning of the 1980s, two significant events marked all segments of Slovenian as well as Yugoslavian society. First was the death of president Josip Broz Tito, which increased feelings of general insecurity, and the second was the beginning of the prolonged economic crisis that lasted until the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Slovenia, after the initial “shock”, which was also reflected in the increasing crime rate, was able to avoid general ethnic tensions in Yugoslavia (Slovenia was the most homogenous republic) and tackle the consequences of the economic crisis with a generous welfare state, which could afford due to its status of the most developed republic within Yugoslavia (Kolarič et al., 2011; Szayna, 2000).

  8. It has to be emphasized that the Slovenian population practically has not increased since 2014, and changes in the statistical methodology applied by Slovenian police occur (Japelj, 2017, pp. 69–70).

  9. A decrease in the number of entries of prisoners after 2018 can be, at least partly, attributed to the adaptation of the first Probation Act in 2017 and the establishment of the Probation Service in 2018. According to the provisions in the law regulations, individuals convicted to up to 2 years of imprisonment for non–violent offences can serve their sentence in the form of community work (Meško et al., 2020; Probation Act, 2017).

  10. Despite the lack of victimological studies in the socialist era, other victimological research was well developed in Slovenia.

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Acknowledgements

This paper is based on a research project Penal policy in Yugoslavia and Slovenia in an integrated Europe perspective (193653/1) that was financially supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).

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  1. Faculty of Criminal Justice and Security, University of Maribor, Kotnikova ulica 8, 1000, Ljubljana, Slovenia

    Benjamin Flander, Gorazd Meško & Rok Hacin

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Correspondence to Rok Hacin.

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Flander, B., Meško, G. & Hacin, R. Punishment in Slovenia: Seventy Years of Penal Policy Development. Eur J Crim Policy Res 29, 625–645 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10610-022-09524-8

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