The present work is the result of a study dealing with the way in which people who have been committed to a night-time correctional institution, supervision or hostel for juvenile offenders experience their loss of freedom or their supervision and the treatment they are accorded in the system.

The objective is to establish a knowledge of how the measures applied by the Prison Service are carried out in practice. The data on which the study is based were collected in interviews with convicted persons and the staff in the institutions and the Prison Service.

The Greenlandic Penal Code is known for its so-called "offender principle", according to which it is not the intention for the sentences to punish, but to find the "measure" judged to be most suited to prevent the guilty person from engaging in further crime. The aim of rehabilitation plays an important part.

It emerges from the report that the original intentions concerning treatment and rehabilitation are not so easy to fulfil as the originators of the Criminal Code might have imagined, but at the same time a picture is also drawn of a prison system which still differs fundamentally from what is known in the rest of the world.