Deprivation of Freedom
Deprivation of Freedom
a type of criminal punishment consisting in the compulsory isolation of the criminal from society. It is served in special places of confinement designated by the state for this purpose. Under Soviet criminal law, deprivation of freedom may be assigned only by a court judgment for a person guilty of committing a crime for a term of three months to ten years and, in certain cases provided for by law, for a term of not more than 15 years (a person who has not attained the age of 18 before the commission of a crime may not be deprived of freedom for more than ten years).
Deprivation of freedom involves restriction of the rights of convicted persons in accordance with the court judgment and the conditions for serving the particular type of punishment (for example, prisoners are deprived of freedom of movement). As a rule, the court judgment imposing deprivation of freedom is served in a correctional labor colony (minors are sent to educational-labor colonies). Deprivation of freedom in the form of imprisonment may be assigned for especially dangerous recidivists or persons who after attaining the age of 18 committed especially dangerous state crimes or other grave crimes and were sentenced to terms of more than five years.
The laws of other socialist countries establish punishment in the form of deprivation of freedom on the same principles as Soviet law. The laws of the socialist states establish maximum terms of deprivation of freedom (for example, in Bulgaria, Hungary, the German Democratic Republic, Poland, and Czechoslovakia the maximum is 15 years; in a few cases, indicated by law, it is 20 years), the grounds for its application, and the procedure for serving deprivation of freedom. Deprivation of freedom is assigned by a court, generally for grave crimes and also for malicious recidivists.
The laws of most bourgeois countries provide for deprivation of freedom in its several forms (imprisonment, arrest) as a measure of punishment. Bourgeois law typically establishes long terms of deprivation of freedom, including indeterminate confinement (for example, indeterminate confinement in France, life imprisonment in the United States). Such long terms of deprivation of freedom correspond to the purpose of punishment in the bourgeois states—the infliction of physical and moral suffering on the convicted person. Although the bourgeois states formally proclaim the principle of the equality of all citizens before the law, special conditions of deprivation of freedom are applied for convicted persons from the ruling class. For example, in the United States there is the “honor system,” whereby prisoners are sent to special open places of imprisonment with mitigated conditions.