Alternatives to custodial penalties in the light of developments in the Moroccan draft criminal law: Justifications for its approval and approaches to its activation

Various studies and researches in the punitive field unanimously agreed on the failure of the short-term custodial punishment to achieve its goals of reforming the offender and reintegrating him back into the social fabric. Overcoming this failure crisis has become an obsession that various countries are trying to overcome.

Perhaps one of the most important findings of contemporary criminal policy is the adoption of new alternatives to confront the crisis, which have always emphasized in the recommendations of many international conferences the necessity of resorting to alternatives to short-term custodial penalties.

Morocco, in turn, is experiencing the dilemma of short-term liberty-depriving penalties, the most prominent of which is the negative effects it leaves behind on the prisoner and prison institutions, such as overcrowding, the rise in recidivism, and others. By claiming the need to find alternatives to prison sentences, as there has become an urgent need to review and review legislative texts to limit short-term penalties of deprivation of liberty, and reduce their negative aspects, which the legislator responded to through the draft criminal law.

The importance of this topic emerges from the fact that the system of alternatives to short-term penalties of deprivation of liberty occupies a special place because it is one of the issues in which legal, social and economic efforts must be integrated to address some aspects of the failure of the prison sentence to reintegrate and reform the prisoner. To adopt alternatives to sanctions in order to devote new horizons in the field of punitive policy.

In order to address this issue, we need to raise the following main problem:

What are the justifications for approving the draft criminal law for alternative penalties? What are the prospects for its activation?

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