Legislation Introducing Imprisonment Sanction in 2005-2015 Poland: Legislative Inflation and its Impact on Sentencing

• In Event: Criminal Law Making Policy WG Panel 1. Criminal Policy Trends from a macro perspective

Abstract

Paper examines the growth of legal provisions establishing criminal sanction of imprisonment in contemporary Poland. In governance literature, the phenomenon of growing: number and volume of legal acts/provisions is referred to as “legislative inflation”. In criminology, “overcriminalization” refers to legislation excessively proclaiming specific conduct illegal (defining and penalizing “new crimes”).

The timespan of research (2005-2015) was defined by (i) Polish EU accession in May 2004 and (ii) Polish “rule of law crisis” in Dec 2015. Thereby, the goal was to examine period of “ordinary” criminal policy and lawmaking – as opposed to populist-authoritarian one. Research involved three stages.

First involved “mapping” of the legal provisions establishing crimes with imprisonment sanctions in (i) codes (Penal Code of 1997 and Fiscal Penal Code of 1999) and (ii) other pieces of statutory legislation (“laws”). To this end Semi-Automated Data Labelling approach was employed to the “stock of law” (i.e. all laws in force at a given point of time) on Jan 1st 2005 (N=784) and 2015 (N=1139). Beyond the abovementioned codes, provisions introducing crimes with imprisonment sanctions were identified in 92 (2005) and 112 (2015) laws.

Of them, 68 laws remained in force over the examined decade, and 21 “old” laws had been replaced with 16 new ones (that also contained crimes with imprisonment sanctions). Three laws containing crimes with imprisonment sanctions were repealed, while in 10 laws such provisions were added. On top of that, 18 brand-new laws containing such provisions were passed during 2005-2015 period.

Second stage looked at “policy formulation” and “lawmaking” aspects of identified changes (i.e. who prepared draft law introducing crimes with imprisonment sanctions, what arguments had been developed to advocate such change and which parliamentary majority legislated it).

Third stage took “law in action” perspective and examined number of people sentenced for committing crimes introduced in abovementioned laws.

Authors

• Kamil Jonski, SGH Warsaw School of Economics

• Joanna Klimczak, Institute of Justice, Poland