ABSTRACT
The history and evolution of community punishment in Lithuania reflects political changes and discloses a metamorphosis of attitudes towards offenders. Correctional crowding problems forced politicians and researchers to rethink sentencing and correctional policies, to focus on alternative forms of punishment to imprisonment, one of which is community supervision. The new Probation Act implemented in 2012 is oriented towards the implementation of probationer’s re-socialization and support rather than concentrating solely on the control issues. Subsequent legal acts specified terms and conditions for substituting imprisonment with community sentence. In cases when there is a sufficient basis for believing that the purpose of the penalty can be achieved without a sentence being served, the suspended sentence started to be imposed. This was followed by a plethora of new conditions, such as participation in cognitive-behavioural programmes, which are now imposed by the court. Along with the implementation of a new penal policy, the criteria for evaluation of effectiveness of the probation service were formulated. Although a wide range of criteria are used, the relative number of successful probation sentences as well as the number of breaches are emphasized in the process of monitoring the implementation of the new policy. Courts and especially probation offices became key institutions responsible for successful implementation of probation; however, their functions in probation process differ. This chapter examines Lithuanian breach processes in the context of conditional release from prison and supervisory sentences. It presents an analysis of the legal acts, official reports and interviews with different officials involved in breach process (the direct work supervisor, the probation officer and the judge) and concludes by suggesting that probation officers as decision-makers are the most interested in successful implementation of community supervision sentences.
