The present article arises from a study developed in the context of a Social Service curricular internship in a penal team of great Lisbon. Within the scope of the Directorate-General of Reintegration and Prison Services (DGRSP), penal teams’ main responsibility is to monitor the whole process of social reintegration of individuals serving community-based sentences, but also to assist the competent bodies in the criminal-legal scope. Among the various responsibilities, we find the monitoring of the measures for those who cannot be held criminally responsible, the unimputables.
In this regard, it was intended to deepen the knowledge on the problem of unimputability through the characterisation of the unimputable population monitored in 2019/2020 by the referred team. The universe of the population in question was of 55 cases, and it was possible to analyse 42 of these cases. The present study, of a descriptive nature, was carried out through document analysis (data collection from the individual’s files) and subsequent analysis, using SPSS. It was possible to find that there exist some common characteristics that allow us to present a description of the unimputable persons monitored in 2019 and 2020: individual of the male gender, single, aged between 40 and 59 years, of Portuguese nationality, without a defined profession, diagnosed with schizophrenia – alone or in combination with other pathologies – primary and serving a non-prisonal internment measure.