Alongside fines, custodial sentences are the dominant form of punishment in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). Under the 2003 Criminal Code of BiH, which served as a model for subsequent revisions of codes in the entities and Brčko district (see chapter 6), offenders can be punished with either a fine or up to 20 years imprisonment (Art. 40) or, exceptionally, up to 45 years (Art. 42.2). Community based penalties can replace custodial sentences of below six months (Art. 43.1), yet while the code provides for community sanctions, the infrastructure to realise these is not in place, and so this and the following chapter will focus primarily on those prisons under the authority of the ministries of justice of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FBiH) and Republika Srpska (RS), and on tentative developments in the direction of penal provision under the state-level Ministry of Justice. Again the first chapter will highlight various challenges in the prisons sector which have accompanied transition, while the second will focus on international assistance and intervention. The two previous pairs of chapters, on police and courts in Bosnia and Herzegovina, were able to draw on a wide range of literature to locate those elements of the criminal justice field at the nexus of cross-cutting questions of state, democracy and legitimacy in the context of transition. Police, even in a reconfigured field of security governance, are seen as central to the state and their practices firmly linked to democracy. Courts were placed at the heart of the criminal justice field, legitimating those other elements of the field with routine recourse to the use of physical force, and providing a public space for the exploration of norms and values. The importance of these elements of the criminal justice field was reflected in the level of international attention they have received subsequent to the Dayton Peace Accords.

Punishment, and more specifically for the purposes of this chapter, imprisonment, come at the end of the chain, by which stage a number of important decisions have been taken earlier in the criminal justice process, ving the execution of the sentence to be carried out.