Punishment in Slovenia: Seventy Years of Penal Policy Development

This paper focuses on a comprehensive study of penal policy in Slovenia in the last 70 years, providing an analysis of statistical data on crime, conviction, and prison populations. After a sharp political and penal repression in the first years after World War II, penal and prison policy began paving the way to a unique “welfare sanction system”, grounded in ideas of prisoners’ treatment. After democratic reforms in the early 1990s, the criminal legislation became harsher, but Slovenia managed to avoid the general punitive trends characterized by the era of penal state and culture of control. The authoritarian socialist regime at its final stage had supported the humanization of the penal system, and this trend continued in the first years of the democratic reforms in the 1990s, but it lost its momentum after 2000. In the following two decades, Slovenia experienced a continuous harshening of criminal law and sanctions on the one hand and an increasing prison population rate on the other. From 2014 onwards, however, there was a decrease in all segments of penal statistics. The findings of the study emphasize the exceptionalism of Slovenian penal policy, characterized by penal moderation, which is the product of the specific local historical, political, economic, and normative developments.