New legal codes, introduced in 1960, were part of the effort to establish legal norms in administering laws. Although socialist legality remained in force after 1960, the dictatorial and utopian trends continued to influence the legal process. Persecution of political and religious dissenters continued, but at the same time there was a tendency to decriminalize lesser offenses by handing them over to people's courts and administrative agencies and dealing with them by education rather than by incarceration.[5] By late 1986, the Mikhail Gorbachev era was stressing anew the importance of individual rights in relation to the state and criticizing those who violated procedural law in implementing Soviet justice.