A comparative study of Iran's and England's legislative criminal policy in the direction of incarceration and de-incarceration

Deprivation of liberty is one of the most severe punishments in the world's criminal systems. Criminological and criminological ideas in the form of punishmentism and utilitarianism have always challenged the penal systems in applying this punishment. The lack of a coherent criminal policy and the adoption of contradictory positions towards incarceration and de-incarceration in Iran require that by studying the comparative criminal policy of an advanced legal system like England and identifying the criteria and measures of punishment in it, we should find out what are the effective components of Iran's legislative criminal policy in incarceration and de-incarceration? What changes have been made in this policy according to the law of 2012 as well as the law on reducing penal imprisonment in 2019? 

The research method in this article is a qualitative content analysis with a directional approach, which tries to emphasize the necessity of adopting a clear and codified legal criminal policy in the application of imprisonment by identifying the strengths and weaknesses of the recent actions of the legislator.

In the Iranian penal system, there is basically no coherent penal policy, especially in the case of deprivation of liberty, although the legislator has periodically reduced the term of imprisonment and encouraged the use of quasi-criminal responses and fraternal institutions, but the last determination of the legislator in line with De-incarceration in the form of the Law on Reduction of Imprisonment due to the adoption of a contradictory criminal policy in the field of sentencing and punishment of similar crimes, the lack of rules to measure the severity of crimes, the lack of macro decision-making in criminal policy, the superiority of the paradigm of punitiveness over utilitarianism in the thinking and behavior of legislators and judges, and the lack The necessary infrastructure for the correct implementation of imprisonment and its alternatives, while not reducing the prison population, has also failed in the implementation of macro policies of de-incarceration.