I’ve just read “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” and something struck me
The journalist Blomkvist receives a prison term, but he doesn’t have to serve it straight away, and is allowed to live his life, seemingly freely, for a certain length of time before he has to go to jail.
I’ve never encountered anything like this, does it happen anywhere else in the world, and what is the rationale behind it?
I too have wondered how cushy prisoners have it there.
In the book (not the movie) “Catch Me If You Can,” Frank Abagnale describes his prison term in Sweden as something akin to spending a few months at a luxury resort.
In Spain it’s common to have a first prison sentence suspended; it’s automatic for low sentences (I don’t know what the cutoff is). You screw up again, you have to serve both terms; you stay clean for the time set in the sentence, you’re free. It’s like getting parole but without having set a foot in prison.
My cousin got a one-month sentence for drugs, but his lawyer thought that he needed a good scare, so he got the judge to make it a “day in prison, night at Mom’s” term instead. It worked: previously he had been unable to get a job, he’s been working steadily since and it’s all due to the change in attitude. His girlfriend, who had gotten the usual suspension instead, did not understand why he refused to go back to dealing happy pills and to hang out with the distributors; they broke up over it.
I understand about suspended sentences, we have them here too (I’m Irish), but this didn’t seem like a suspended sentence in the normal sense. He didn’t commit another crime. It just seemed like he was told he was going to jail, but not just yet. I thought it a bit strange.
I can’t find the translation for this term in English, but in Spain a sentence has to be “firme” before it has to be complied with. This may involve different delays at different levels, for example time waiting until the judges finish writing the sentence and checking all their dots and crosses, (there is a current civil case that has gone over 12 drafts, fer Pilates’ sake! and this was the Constitutional Court, they’re supposed to know their dots and crosses!) or time given for the accused and lawyer to decide whether they’re going to the next-higher level. Sometimes (usually white collar crime) the accused who’s expecting the firme is still free, although with movement restrictions (“can’t leave the country” kind of things).
I cannot speak to Sweden, but, regarding ‘anywhere else in the world’: in Germany it is pretty common for someone sentenced to a (non-suspended) prison term, not in jail prior to the trial and not considered a flight risk to leave the court unarrested and to receive a notice later to report to a stated prison at a stated date.
For example, when I served as an associate lay judge in a trial of several young men accused of robbery, some of them were arrested at the time of the trial (considered flight risks), and others not.
When we convened for sentencing we had to decide
For those with non-suspended sentences and not arrested that meant they’d get a notice to report to prison either some time after the deadline to file an appeal elapsed, or if they appealed and the appeal was refused (seems to take about half a year in Germany) some time after that decision.
The rationale seems to be that it’s more convenient for both prisoner and prison system to be able to plan ahead.
Wait - this guy’s own lawyer arranged that? Did your cousin consent to this?
If not - ye gods. A lawyer’s first job is to advocate for the client’s best interests, as defined by the client, unless the client is incompetent to define those interests. Being drug-addled doesn’t count - I’m talking “lock-me-in-a-padded-room” incompetent. For a lawyer to actively persuade a judge to incarcerate his client, when that client wants nothing less than freedom - that’s pretty terrible.
These are pictures from a brand new prison in neighboring Norway.
not bad!
Didn’t Conrad Black get to spend Christmas with his family before commencing his prison term in the US? From the Wikipedia page on United States v. Conrad Black, he was sentenced (to 6 1/2 years) on December 10, 2007 and ordered to report to a prison in Orlando on March 3, 2008. I think I remember hearing that he asked for and got this delay, but the article doesn’t mention it, and maybe it’s just standard procedure as well.
Yes, in the United States, there can be a delay between sentencing date and report date, and the convicting person will sometimes be allowed to self-surrender. This report might be helpful:
Very common in Norway as well - due to shortages of prison space, convicted felons are frequently having to wait months between conviction and actually being “allowed” to start serving their sentence. Only for the worst of crimes, the biggets security risks or for those with a very clear flight risk, are incarceration immediately following sentencing normal.
Yes, but you can’t leave.
I don’t care if it’s a Doubletree with a good restaurant; it’s the part about not being allowed to leave that makes it suck.
I think this almost only happens with non-violent offenders who have been shown not to pose a flight risk (i.e. they have strong ties to the community, and usually the sentence is short enough to make them want to go in and get it over with—I doubt they would let a guy facing life without parole or a Utah 5 gun salute have a few weeks of freedom to get his affairs in order…