Reception of Criminal Justice in Europe

Reception of Criminal Justice in Lithuania

Aleksandras Dobryninas, from the Vilnius University, made a contribution to the 2012 Annual Conference of the European Society of Criminology, in the category “Crime and Society,” under the title “Reception of Criminal Justice in Lithuania”. Here is the abstract: The attitude to criminal justice in Lithuania is a quite controversial social problem. On the one hand, during last decades Lithuanian government do a lot in getting rid from the previous soviet understanding and treatment of criminal justice as an effective weapon in the hand of “progressive working class” against “reactionary bourgeois elements”. On the other hand, the implementations of democratic principles of criminal justice are not still widely accepted in the society. Low trust and confidence in criminal justice institutions, high incarceration rate, populist calls for strengthening penal policy – are only few indicators of the public resistance to the new democratic and humanistic principles of criminal justice. In the framework of the research project “Reception of Criminal Justice in Society” administrated by the Research Council of Lithuania the interdisciplinary team of researchers from Vilnius University analyzes different types of social knowledge on criminal justice, and their impact on professional, political, and public discourses concerning crime and punishment in Lithuanian society.

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Further Reading

• “Reception of Criminal Justice in Lithuania”, by Aleksandras Dobryninas (Proceedings)