This paper is concerned with the issue of robberies in the Czech Republic, primarily in the capital city, Prague. Statistics show that there has been a sharp rise in the number of robberies recorded in the Czech Republic following the political upheavals of 1989. In spite of this, current Czech criminology does not give proper attention to this kind of criminal activity. For this reason, the authors will attempt not only to summarise research efforts hitherto undertaken in this field and place them in a wider international context, but also to offer basic and criminologically relevant data on offenders, victims and some other significant factors, making use of official crime statistics as well as special police statistical records, including data obtained through the authors' own analysis of a sample of court files.

Recidivism is one of the measures that can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of sanctions imposed by the criminal justice system. The article summarizes findings from the most extensive research of this type in the Czech Republic. The sample included a total of 4,233 individuals sentenced to house arrest, community service, suspended sentences with supervision or released from prison in 2012. Recidivism was defined as a new record in the Criminal Register in 2014. It was revealed that 48.1% of the sample re-offended in the two year period. While the type of sanction imposed on the offender had a negligible impact, the likelihood of a new conviction was strongly linked to gender, age and previous criminal career. The significance of previous convictions and their number was confirmed also by the multivariate analysis using logistic regression. The importance of these findings is high and the recidivism should be monitored systematically in the Czech Republic. However, as the research showed, it is impossible to connect the effectiveness of crime control with simply finding "effective sanctions". Inevitably, the criminal policy must be understood as an integral part of social policy.

Abstract:The trend towards harsher punishment of offenders, usually termed the 'new punitiveness', is often explained as a response to deepening social and economic uncertainty. One important area that criminal policy research has long dealt with is public attitudes to punishment. Statements that the public want more severe punishments for those who break the law are often used to justify introducing measures to make the criminal justice system harsher. There are, however, different ways to measure public opinion on criminal sentencing. While general attitudinal questions indicate the public to be very punitive in outlook, when they have to evaluate specifi c cases the results are slightly more positive. Drawing on data from the European Social Survey, the article aims to describe the current level of punitiveness in the Czech Republic, as measured by both above-mentioned indicators, and to assess whether the respondents' answers to such indicators are infl uenced by the same factors. Data show that Czechs tend to have relatively strong punitive attitudes. However, past studies have shown that people are less punitively inclined when they are judging a specifi c case. Moreover, regression analysis suggests that, rather than individual punitive sentiments, the general measure of punitiveness refl ects cognitive and emotional reactions of a different nature (e.g. the quality of work of the court system), which means that the information on public attitudes it produces could be misleading.

Previous research on non-custodial sentences has pointed to the association between awareness of alternatives to prison and public opinion on these alternative measures. Using data from a public opinion survey conducted in the Czech Republic in 2018, the main objective of this study is to examine the extent to which public opinion on probation is influenced by awareness of probation service and support for probation in general. The data suggest that those generally in favour of probation, unlike those opposed, agree with this measure being imposed on a wider range of offenders, are more lenient towards offenders who violate the conditions of their probation, and perceive probation as being beneficial to the criminal justice system and society as a whole. On the other hand, the public’s awareness of the probation service per se seems not to be as important as whether or not the basic principles of probation are embraced.

The main objective of this study is to examine interest in the implementation of five restorative justice programs as reported by 225 employes of the Prison Service of the Czech Republic and to identify the factors that underpin such interest. The results show that perceived usefulness and familiarity with the program are crucial factors that influence the respondent's interest in program implementation. Additionally, awareness of the concept of restorative justice and agreement with its principles are likely to have an indirect effect, mediated through perceived usefulness.