L’Emprisonnement avec sursis au Québec : impact de l’arrêt Proulx

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Conditional sentencing, introduced in Canada in 1996 to reduce the practice of incarceration for sentences of less than two years, allows a convicted offender to serve his or her prison sentence in the community. This article presents the descriptive and analytical findings from unpublished, empirical research on conditional sentencing in the province of Quebec. We elaborate on the changes to probation with respect to the Proulx judgment, pronounced in 2000 by the Supreme Court of Canada, and to the management framework for this measure, implemented throughout Quebec in 2001. An analysis of the findings leads to considerable data on the evolution of conditional sentencing with respect to the clientele, the sentences and, most of all, the court-imposed conditions for conditional sentences, particularly house arrest and curfew. The breach of conditions and re-offending by convicted offenders, and the management of these relapses, complete this portrait of the use, the successes, and the failures of conditional sentencing in Quebec. These results enable us to highlight the fact that the Proulx judgment has had an important impact, in Quebec, on the judicial and administrative practices involved in conditional sentencing.