Out of sight, out of trouble? : Imprisonment as sanction in the Republic of Macedonia

Abstract

Imprisonment as a sanction is known to every class society. The essential meaning of its existence was justified with the action of keeping criminals safe until the day that they will be publicly executed. Years later, imprisonment got repressive and retributive elements keeping inmates far away from their communities, for a long period of time. Today this sanction kept its retributive side, but also got another, preventive one, changing its dimension into a contradictory one.

Macedonian Penal System has imprisonment as main punishment since 1991. It can only be used as a main punishment for severe crimes, taking into account the criminal’s history, his motive, modus operandi and brutality. Statistics help us conclude that our country uses imprisonment very often, at the same time making re - socialization harder.

The paper gives a short overview of the use of different sanctions through the years, their changing dimensions, and the importance of imprisonment in the past and its place in modern times. It also, by using data from the State Statistical Office of the Republic of Macedonia analyses how often Macedonian criminal and penal policy chooses the retributive over restorative elements of the sanctions.