34 The Death Penalty in the OSCE Area today regarding the need to break criminals on the wheel or set them alight, and the fairness of doing so.”25 Abolition of the death penalty raises the question of the form of punishment that should replace it. The experience of those countries that renounced the death penalty more than a century ago and those countries that did so only recently shows that an alternative to this form of punishment is life imprisonment. However, problems associated with this form of punishment are very complex and their resolution requires detailed, in-depth, scrupulous study. The very term life imprisonment, in the words of the British expert Peter Hodgkinson, entails a certain amount of confusion.26 There are issues associated with the minimum and maximum prison term (in Austria, the average prison term is 22 years; in Croatia, between 20 and 40 years; in Denmark, the maximum term is 20 years; in Estonia, 30 years; in Finland, individuals serve, on average, 10 to 15 years and are released by a presidential decree; in Latvia, the minimum is not less than six months up to a maximum of 50 years; while in Poland, the minimum is 20 years; Sweden and Bulgaria have full life imprisonment); how prisoners are housed, i.e., separately or with other prisoners; the conditions of guarding them and providing security; parole; education; training of corresponding staff with backgrounds in law, psychology, and other areas that allows them to organize work for such prisoners; and a multitude of other issues that we not only need to study and assimilate but also, taking into account the realities, accept that system that largely meets our needs. In this matter, the vast experience acquired by highly developed countries across the globe, as well as their direct help and real financial support for the matter initiated, will be of enormous help to us. Finally, there is one other important innovation in the sphere of our country’s criminal-law policy, i.e., adoption of the Law “On Amendments and Additions to the Criminal Code”, which, in turn, is aimed at the further humane development of criminal legislation, as a result of which many prisoners have been released from serving further time in prison, while many others have had their sentences reviewed with a view to having them reduced. To sum up, it should be acknowledged that the phased humanization of criminal legislation applicable in Tajikistan is the next step towards the optimal performance of those tasks that will bring us nearer to those states that have an enhanced legal structure, to becoming an open society, where the rule of law is indisputable. 25 26 Tagantsev, op.cit., note 16, p. 255. Peter Hodgkinson, Pozhiznennoe lishenie svobody: mezhdunarodnye standarty i praktika: Materialy mezhdunarodnoi nauchno-prakticheskoi konferentsii (Almaty, 2003), p. 25.