Parole and House Arrest: Issues of Interchangeability

Abstract

The article examines the practice of early release on parole for persons before being sentenced. The pre-trial restrictions concern detention and house arrest. The main purpose of the article is a reasonable response to the question about whether the right to set off time of detention under house arrest in six months’ imprisonment necessary for the emergence of the right to parole? To achieve the purpose, the article analyzes the current enforcement practice and opinions of scientists on this issue and the nbased on the results presents arguments to defend author’s position. The key findings of the research are: 1) offsetting time spent in detention to calculate a factual time in imprisonment to address the issueof parole is a common practice based on the positions of the highest judicial bodies of the country and supported by part of scholars in the field of criminal law; 2) when deciding in practice on recalculating time under house arrest, the decision is based on the following reasoning: since the time of the personunder house arrest shall be credited to the period of detention, and the detention period is included in the term of imprisonment, when calculating the actual period of detention, imprisonment for parole period of house arrest should be included in that period; 3) this reasoning is flawed because it is based on a dogmatic rather than systemic interpretation of the Criminal Code and Code of Criminal Procedure without understanding the role of the set six-month term in the parole system of criminal law measures; 4) by its nature, the deprivation of liberty and detention of a person from the point of criminal law arealmost identical, but the house arrest is substantially different from them; 5) the paper proposes to amend the Resolution of the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation of 21.04.2009№ 8 “On Judicial Practice Parole from Serving a Sentence, Replacing the Unserved Part of Punishment with a Milder one”.