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EU: New handbook on alternatives to prison

12 July 2016

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"Severe overcrowding and bad conditions are common features of prisons in all the eight states involved in this, the latest European Prison Observatory project: Italy, France, Greece, Latvia, Poland, Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom. Community-based sanctions and controls are quite new in some of these countries, but long part of the criminal justice system in others (notably France and the UK). Latvia, the biggest per capita user of imprisonment, stands alone among these eight states, in having recently legislated to end the use of imprisonment across a large group of offences. By contrast the UK, another high per capita user of prison, has seen sentences grow longer and the imprisonment net widen: the state of our prisons is now widely acknowledged as a national disgrace.

The Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (the Observatory’s UK partner) has long argued for an end to our over-reliance on prison, based as it is on the false premise that punishment and control can address social problems like poverty, substance dependency and mental ill-health. This project gave us the chance to compare the UK with other EU countries and assess the role that alternatives to custody have played in changes to prison populations. We found a complicated picture."

See: Alternatives to imprisonment in Europe (Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, link) and the handbook: Alternatives to imprisonment in Europe: A handbook of good practice (link to pdf)

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