Suspended Prison Sentences in Czechia: How They Came to Dominate the Penal Landscape and Their Consequences

Abstract Suspended prison sentences are the most commonly imposed sanction type in the majority of post-communist European countries. In Czechia, they began to be widely used within a year after they were first introduced in 1919 despite having been conceived as a rather exceptional measure. Since the 1989 Velvet revolution they have come to dominate the Czech penal landscape, in part due to the unavailability of intermediate sanctions, increasing crime rates, limited state resources and the historic overuse of short prison sentences. Now, in 2024, when none of these factors apply any longer, suspended prison sentences continue to occupy a central position within the Czech penal system. The prominence of suspended prison sentences complicates principled sentencing because the legal provisions that govern them have not changed as their scope and use have increased. This has led to suspended prison sentences being considered a separate type of sanction rather than as a variant prison sentence by practitioners, making it difficult to formulate a coherent conception of this sanction and to define rules governing its imposition. The revocation of suspension after very long suspended prison sentences were imposed in Czechia was also one reason for the country’s very high prison population. I argue that one of the main reasons why the scope of suspended prison sentences was enlarged so much without any consideration of the harmful effects this would cause was an ill-considered penal policy created in the absence of sophisticated sentencing scholarship and a lack of attention to sentencing principles.