Determination and individualisation of penalties

In criminal law, as a consequence of the principle of legality, the sanctions to be imposed on offenders for criminal acts must be determined prior to the commission of the crime. However, abstractly determined penalties are not always regulated in such a way that they can be applied to every individual in the same way; for example, penalties have lower and upper limits and the judge determines a penalty according to the characteristics of each concrete case. This is because each individual is different, as well as each concrete event that constitutes a crime is different, and the sanction they face must be differentiated. It is possible to realize the ultimate goal of punishment in this way. Many tools can be used while realizing this differentiation, which is called individualization of punishment; Conversion of short-term imprisonment sentences to some different sanctions listed in the law, postponement of imprisonment, which is one of the ways that aim to allow the offender to serve his/her sentence without entering the execution institution, are examples of these tools. However, the most important and criticized tool is the discretionary reduction, which is a way of making a reduction entirely related to the person and the concrete event, based on the concrete penalty determined by the discretion granted to the judge, which is envisaged by the legislator as a way to adapt the punishment to the person. While these discretionary reduction reasons, which are not required to be applied but are an important way to ensure justice when applied when necessary, are not applied in some countries, they are frequently criticized in our legal system due to application-oriented errors. Despite the criticism that the institution should be removed from the legal order or, as we often hear, that its implementation should be prohibited in terms of some crimes, this institution does not lose its importance, and the possibility of better implementation of the institution arises by taking advantage of the criticisms. Keywords Purpose of punishment, determination of punishment, individualization of punishment, alternative sanctions, postponement, reasons for discretionary reduction, discretion