Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Western Europe knows not "mass incarceration." Scholars and professionals worried, as crime rates rose for two decades through the 1990s, that America's imprisonment boom portended something similar. That was avoided, partly by adoption of American innovations intended to divert people from prosecution or imprisonment. Sometimes policy transfer succeeds. Prosecutorial diversion programs, pioneered in New York and Washington, D. C., in the 1960s and later adopted in many places, soon languished. European equivalents, conditional dismissals and penal orders, were widely adopted or expanded beginning in the 1970s and remain in extensive use. The prison alternatives trajectory is similar. Community service began in California in the 1960s, restitution in Minnesota in 1972, victim-offender mediation in Indiana in the mid-l970s, and electronic monitoring in New Mexico in 1983. All were later deemed insufficiently punitive and ceased being widely used. In Europe, fines are the most commonly imposed prison alternatives, followed by community service. Electronic monitoring and mediation are used in most countries, often in some. The European reaction to rising crime rates-diversion and prison alternatives rather than harsher sentencing and overcrowded prisons-resulted from reluctance to politicize the criminal law, commitments to human rights ideals, and strong social welfare traditions.
Source: Crime and Justice
DOI: 10.1086/737410
Author: Michael Tonry
Language: English
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4414202384