Abstract
Suspended prison sentences are the most commonly imposed sanctions in a majority of post-communist European countries. In Czechia, they began to dominate the penal landscape in one year from their enactment in 1919 and their proportion further increased after the 1989 Velvet revolution, which I document on 1919-1931 and 1955-2017 official data. Identified contributing factors were (i) fine being the only alternative sanction, (ii) increasing crime rate, (iii) limited state resources, and (iv) very short prison sentences being imposed prior to the introduction of suspended prison sentences into the criminal justice system. However, currently, when none of these factors is true, suspended prison sentences still occupy the central position within the Czech penal system.
Such prominence complicates fair sentencing. The suspended prison sentence was in 1919 conceived as an exceptional measure to avoid the execution of possibly criminogenic very short prison sentences. An overwhelming net-widening took place over the last hundred years, leading to suspended prison sentences being considered a specific sanction (suspended sentence) and not a prison sentence by the practitioners. Except for enlarging the scope of cases to which suspended prison sentence could be applied, legal provisions remained rather unchanged. Imposing very long suspended prison sentences in Czechia lead at the same time to a high prison population and a discontent with lenient sentencing. I argue that one of the main contributing factors of enlarging the scope of suspended prison sentences without considering its unintended harmful effects was an ill-considered penal policy resulting from the absence of sophisticated sentencing scholarship and the lack of attention paid to sentencing. This deficiency was due to historical events disabling criminology in Czechi