Attitudes toward sentencing purposes provide insight into the level of knowledge about the existing sanctions, about the level of preferences for certain punitive policies, and about the level of support toward punishing and/or rehabilitative practices. It can be assumed that general public, due to lack of direct experience, or lack of information, does not have enough knowledge to give professional assessment of police and judiciary activities or the section adequacy, but they can certainly give valid general impression of the police and judiciary work. On the other hand, it can be assumed that attitude of the stakeholders who have professional or direct experience with the justice system will be empirically-based. Therefore, it seemed interesting to examine whether the public, police and prisoners differ in their views about the purposes of sanctions, the causes of criminal behavior, trust in the police and judiciary, and the attitude of the sanction severity in Croatia. The analyzed data were collected by questionnaires in 2014 and 2016 from two nationally representative samples (public N2014=482 and N2016=356) and two convenience samples of police officers (N=124) and prisoners (N=238). Police officers expressed the highest level of confidence both in the police and prison system, while the public expressed the highest level of confidence in the judiciary. Also, with time public confidence in the police decreased, and in judiciary increased. While public and prisoners causes of criminal behaviour attributed the most to social circumstances, police officers attributed it to both individual and social circumstances. Generally, participants supported both the punishment and rehabilitation as sentencing purposes, and estimated that crime rate in Croatia is rising. Regarding the sentence severity, both the public and the police officers share the opinion that the existing judicial sentences in Croatia are too lenient, as opposed to prisoners who judged sentences as too severe.