Tímarit lögfræðinga - 01.10.1989, Side 12

treatment and long-term educational efforts in closed institutions.
Instead of this, new ideas have become effective in criminal policy.
As imprisonment has been recognized to have many harmful side
effects for the prisoner, for the social environment of the inmates and
for society as a whole, a new doctrine has become more influential. It
claims that imprisonment and even criminal sanctions as a whole
should be used only as “ultima ratio”. Icelandic criminal law has made
this doctrine its own as early as 1940. The Explanatory Statement,
which accompanied the Bill for the new Criminal Code, states that
punishment should be used only “as a necessary last resort”. In this
country the primary task of the administration of criminal law does
today consist in doing justice to the delinquent. Only by doing so
will it influence public opinion in the direction of general prevention.
In this line of reasoning the most important claim today is that all
criminal sanctions should be primarily proportionate to the gravity
of the crime and to the guilt of the offender. The theory of culpability
can be deduced also from the General Part of the Criminal Code of
Iceland. Article 18 states that only intentional or negligent acts are
punishable, and that negligent behaviour is punished only, if the
statute makes it expressly punishable. Article 19 deals with increased
punishment for special serious consequences produced by the crime:
the perpetrator may be so punished only if, with respect to these
special consequences, he may be charged with at least negligence. Thus
strict liability is excluded in the Criminal Code of Iceland.
As results of the crisis of criminal policy the following ideas may
be cited:
In so far as a criminal sanction cannot be avoided completely by
social means — which is preferable — alternatives to deprivation of
liberty such as fines or community service shall be used. The long-
term indeterminate sentence with non-judicial boards deciding upon
the release-date has lost ground to the determinate sentence which
shall be as short as possible. If appropriate, it shall be suspended and
dependent on conditional release after one half of the term has been
served. New forms of imprisonment have been tested and sometimes
introduced in order to avoid as far as possible harmful side effects on
the personality and social links of the prisoner. These include such
strategies as open institutions, work release, furloughs, weekend im-
prisonment, night detention, detention by fractions of time and other
modifications. All these devices are particulary akin to the present
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