Report of the Human Rights Defender on the activities of the National Preventive Mechanism in Poland in 2013 While the principle of definiteness of sanctions is reflected in the judgments pending execution, the same cannot be said about inevitability of sanctions specified therein and about their preventive role. As a result, this situation may encourage to commit crimes by enhancing the belief about impunity of convicted perpetrators due to inefficiency of executive penal proceedings. The change of the penal policy38, advocated by the HRD for a long time, seems even more obvious given the rationale for the draft of 10 December 2013. Therefore, the legislator’s intention to “reverse the structure of adjudicated penalties to make fines the most often adjudicated penalties, followed by restriction of liberty” should be praised. It should also be noted that a worrying trend has been observed with regard to the conditionally suspended penalty of imprisonment, where courts pass longer sentences of imprisonment when the penalty is suspended than they would if the penalty was not suspended. This fact and the information that in the year 2012 alone the execution of conditionally suspended penalties was ordered towards 54,226 persons (in 2011 towards 49,848, in 2009 towards 48,476, in 2008 towards 46,822) explain why, despite a relatively small percentage of persons sentenced to unconditional imprisonment (which has for years oscillated around 9%-10%, and in absolute terms – ca. 40,000), penitentiary establishments are close to overpopulation and the incarceration rate in Poland is one of the highest in Europe (217 prisoners per 100,000 population, while in Germany – 79, France – 101, Spain – 147, Czech Republic – 154, Romania – 155, Hungary – 186). Mass adjudication of various types of penalties of probation (approximately 301,000 in 2012) is unprecedented in Europe (in Poland 1,056 persons per 100,000 is under probation, while in Spain, which comes second, the number is 509, in France – 365, in Germany – 181 and in Romania – 36). Due to such a huge number of adjudicated penalties of probation, the persons subject to those penalties cannot be effectively rehabilitated due to insufficient human resources and infrastructure (in 2012, in Poland there were approximately 880,000 cases of broadly understood probation). According to the authors of the draft, further legislative inaction in the area of substantive law, without reversing the proportion of adjudicated sanctions, may result in the paralysis of the judiciary also with regard to executive penal cases. The judgment of the Constitutional Tribunal of 17 July 2013 (SK 9/10) is of particular importance in the context of the aforementioned data on penalty ex38 Report of 2012, p. 27; Report of the HRD on the activity of the NMP in 2011, p. 138. 27