ABSTRACT
The penal policy in the Slovak Republic is mostly punitive. The growing number of prisoners and the overcrowding of prisons (and the related negative development of the prison population index) has been a major issue of the Slovak prison system for decades. The high prison population has become more striking during the COVID-19 pandemic. The handling of the detainees and sentenced prisoners is subject to many restrictive measures which need to be compensated adequately. Since March 2020, the number of people admitted to prison to serve their sentence has dropped and many admissions have been suspended, but the number of inmates has not been reduced permanently. Penal policy requires the implementation of new progressive ways of serving sentences (alternatives to imprisonment) and new schemes of conditional release from custodial facilities.
