The 26th Annual Conference of the European Society of Criminology, EUROCRIM 2026, took place at the University of Warsaw, Poland, on 9–12 September. One of the largest and most important annual events in European criminology, this year’s conference brought together 1,740 researchers and practitioners in the field from Europe and around the world. The theme of this year’s conference was “Frontiers of Criminology”.

At the conference, Dr Catherine Appleton, Senior Research Fellow at the LCSS Law Institute, chaired Session 248 and presented the paper “Hope of Release: The Implementation and Impact of Life Imprisonment in Lithuania” together with her colleague Dr Simonas Nikartas. The paper was co-authored with other Law Institute researchers, PhD student Goda Dainauskaitė, Ieva Ruzgytė and Dr Artūras Tereškinas

The presentation outlined preliminary findings from the IMPACT project, conducted at the LCSS Law Institute and funded by the Research Council of Lithuania. In 2019, Lithuania introduced a legal mechanism allowing individuals sentenced to life imprisonment who have served 20 years of their sentence to apply for commutation. Despite the relatively widespread use of life imprisonment in Lithuania, no comprehensive national assessment has yet been conducted of the implementation and impact of these reforms.

The project “Hope of Release: The Implementation and Impact of Life Imprisonment in Lithuania” (IMPACT), carried out by the Law Institute of the Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences, was funded by the Research Council of Lithuania under its “Research Groups Projects” funding scheme.