Prisons and Jails, Criminology of

Use of Imprisonment and Its Alternatives

Scandinavian correctional statistics demonstrate that the number of persons imprisoned at the beginning of the nineteenth century started around 70 per 100,000 inhabitants. This ratio rose to approximately 180 in the middle of that century, only to drop to approximately 60 at the end of the century, where it stayed in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway for the major part of the twentieth century.

Criminologists have examined the high recidivism rates after imprisonment and developed explanations for the sudden decrease from the 1850s to the end of the nineteenth century. Inspired by American and British initiatives, officials and courts implemented correctional alternatives such as conditional sentences and probation and successively enlarged the scope of their [Page 1175]use. Nordic penal groups declared that imprisonment should be a last resort and that sentences should be as short as possible.

In Sweden in the 1930s, the courts did not imprison those who defaulted on their fine payments, eliminating about ten thousand prisoners in a decade. In addition, the government introduced a day-fine system that considered the economic situation of the offender. As a result, officials used the number of fines to track the severity of the crime, but related the amount of each fine to the income and financial situation of the offender. Other European penal systems are now slowly incorporating this approach into their systems.

Many countries still do not utilize traditional penalties such as conditional sentences and probation, nor do they have the more modern sanctions, such as community service or electronic surveillance. Moreover, most European countries have not or have only slightly institutionalized restorative justice as practiced in the United States as an alternative to sentencing and other sanctions. It may be that it is easier to introduce such methods in a common law system than in a codified civil law system.

Ulla Bondeson has studied statistics from the United Nations and the Council of Europe to document the great variation in sentencing practices. In addition, pretrial detention rates similarly show great variation among countries. Roy Walmsley noted that recent figures of global incarceration indicate that penal institutions hold more than 8.75 million people, either as pretrial detainees (remanded prisoners) or as convicted and sentenced prisoners. The prison population rate is approximately 140 per one hundred thousand citizens worldwide, or one out of every seven hundred persons. Looking only at certain age categories and only at men, of course, the figure becomes much higher.

The United States has the highest prison population rate in the world with 680 per one hundred thousand, with about two million people in penal institutions (in 2002). The Russian Federation also has a figure of more than six hundred, and some former republics of the Soviet Union rank near the top. Often, the lowest rates are in small countries with large populations; for example, India and Indonesia have low rates of 28 and 29 per one hundred thousand people, respectively.

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