This paper is concerned with the issue of robberies in the Czech Republic, primarily in the capital city, Prague. Statistics show that there has been a sharp rise in the number of robberies recorded in the Czech Republic following the political upheavals of 1989. In spite of this, current Czech criminology does not give proper attention to this kind of criminal activity. For this reason, the authors will attempt not only to summarise research efforts hitherto undertaken in this field and place them in a wider international context, but also to offer basic and criminologically relevant data on offenders, victims and some other significant factors, making use of official crime statistics as well as special police statistical records, including data obtained through the authors' own analysis of a sample of court files.

Recidivism is one of the measures that can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of sanctions imposed by the criminal justice system. The article summarizes findings from the most extensive research of this type in the Czech Republic. The sample included a total of 4,233 individuals sentenced to house arrest, community service, suspended sentences with supervision or released from prison in 2012. Recidivism was defined as a new record in the Criminal Register in 2014. It was revealed that 48.1% of the sample re-offended in the two year period. While the type of sanction imposed on the offender had a negligible impact, the likelihood of a new conviction was strongly linked to gender, age and previous criminal career. The significance of previous convictions and their number was confirmed also by the multivariate analysis using logistic regression. The importance of these findings is high and the recidivism should be monitored systematically in the Czech Republic. However, as the research showed, it is impossible to connect the effectiveness of crime control with simply finding "effective sanctions". Inevitably, the criminal policy must be understood as an integral part of social policy.