The Conflict between Ideological Interpretation of Penal Jurisprudence and Objectives of Islamic Criminal Justice: an Obstacle Impeding Development of the Islamic-Iranian Criminal Policy

Criminal policy is an interdisciplinary system consisting of several interactive nation-state subsystems that attempt to address serious crimes and deviances by managing criminal justice through organizing the relationships between criminal science and actors within the criminal justice system in both theoretical and practical settings. As an important element at the most strategic level of soft power for any system of governance, criminal justice requires particular attention since any inefficiency in development and monitoring of the national criminal policy system may lead to crisis of efficiency crisis or even legitimacy crisis of a regime. Despite its several strengths, criminal policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran suffer from a number of weaknesses including strategies developed at macro level to govern legislative, judicial, and executive decisions made by legal authorities in the country.
By reviewing the significance of localization of criminal policy, the present study draws on an analytical approach to describe instances that indicate a crisis resulting from lack of a localized criminal policy in the Islamic Republic of Iran. In particular, it examines the process of formation and development of anti-rationalist approaches to penal jurisprudence through a scrutiny of how such approaches hindered realization of ultimate goals in terms of criminal justice at the macro level of the Iranian criminal system. On the other hand, a number of approaches are proposed to strengthen the opposite view that draws on the legal capacities of Islamic jurisprudence to localize a criminal policy centered on Islamic penal jurisprudence and to partially meet the requirements in development of an Islamic-Iranian progress model within the realm of criminal policy system.