The Principle Of Severity With Lenience And Its Practical Application In Execution

It is the inevitable requirement by the building of a harmonious society to implement the Principle of Severity with Leniency as the criminal policy, whose development features profound history, distinctive characteristics of times and global trend.The essence of implementing the Principle of Severity with Leniency is to vary the treatment to different prisoners, that is to say, emphasizing the combination of fighting crimes and safeguarding human rights in order to avail the preventive function of penalty. The theoretical and realistic bases of this criminal policy are the refraining ideology, the status in quo of Chinese prisons, the humanitarianism of penalty and the deprivation of freedom.The prison authority of Jiangsu Province confronted with the conceptual challenge, starts to re-read the prison related policies and technologies, and take proactive actions in exploring and practicing the Principle of Severity with Leniency; however, due to the confinements by the traditional concepts and of the unitary punitive mode as well as the impact of the penalty execution system, it still faces some plights that need urgent solution during the course of practical implementation.The key to this kind of problem is to improve the system of execution, properly increase the proportion of penalty reduction, moderately expand the applicable scope of parole, apply where the law permits the temporary execution of sentence outside prison yet under surveillance so as to raise the level of separate control and custody of prisoners and advance the organic integration of prison execution and community based correction.