An Analysis of the Law on the Reduction of Ta'zir Imprisonment Punishments in Light of the General Policies of Iran's Legal System

Empirical and doctrinal studies concerning the implementation of criminal sanctions have demonstrated that imprisonment entails a range of adverse repercussions extending well beyond the convicted offender, affecting family relations and imposing substantial social costs. In practical terms, the purported benefits of incarceration frequently fall short of the economic, institutional, familial, and social burdens that it generates. Against this backdrop, decarceration, understood as a manifestation of the broader policy of penal reduction, has progressively assumed significance within the framework of macro-level criminal justice policymaking. The present study examines the place of this policy within Iran’s legal and legislative system, with particular emphasis on the higher-order policy documents and the Law on the Reduction of Ta’zir Imprisonment Punishments, enacted in 2020, both of which were adopted in apparent alignment with the general policy of reducing reliance on imprisonment. The central question is the extent to which the provisions of the aforementioned law conform to the general policies governing Iran’s legal system. Through an examination of the relevant policy documents and the 2020 Law on the Reduction of Ta’zir Imprisonment Punishments, the study concludes that the legislation, particularly in view of the explanatory rationale underlying its enactment—including the necessity of revisiting the existing penal framework, reducing the prison population, curtailing public expenditure associated with prison administration, addressing the absence of a coherent judicial criterion and rational legal basis for prescribing imprisonment for various offenses, and reconsidering the compatibility of imprisonment with certain Islamic legal principles and its limited historical precedent in the governance of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)—is broadly consistent with the macro-level policies of the legal system and the objective of decarceration. Nevertheless, the law appears to have been enacted without reliance upon a sufficiently determinate normative or principled criterion. This deficiency has resulted, in certain provisions, in a divergence between the operative content of the legislation and the underlying rationale and declared philosophy of its enactment.