The rights of the individual citizen are defended in the 1971 Constitution and in the Criminal Code of 1968, which was not altered by the constitution. The latter states that a crime can only be an act so identified in the code and for which a punishment is prescribed. These principles can and have been abused--the state is set above the individual, and the judicial machinery is within an agency of the executive branch of the government--but those who exercise the machinery have become increasingly responsive to its guiding statutes. The limits on punishments that are set down in the code allow somewhat greater sentences to be handed down upon those committing crimes against the state or state property than upon individuals or private property. INTERNAL SECURITY State and Internal Security Forces During the time of readjustment after Joseph Stalin's death in 1953, Bulgaria's police state period gradually came to a close. In the postwar period until then, the country had had police machinery modeled on that of Stalinist Soviet Union, with state security troops (secret police) and garrisoned interior troops equipped like mobile army infantry units. The state security troops, the garrisoned interior troops, and the regular police forces are estimated to have totaled about 200,000 men. Although state and internal security organs have been shifted among ministries and renamed, and there has been an occasional move to abolish them, they continue to exist in Bulgaria. Although the organizational form is probably much the same as before, that is, an internal security force and a state security police, the security apparatus has only a fraction of its former personnel and has been shorn of its more arbitrary powers. According to some observers, Bulgaria has emerged from a police state, wherein security forces held arbitrary powers of arrest that instilled fear in the people, to a police bureaucracy in which the militia meddles in peoples' lives to the point of public frustration. People no longer have reason to fear the tyranny of a secret police, but they have developed a strong resentment of the petty militia regulations that affect their daily lives.