Despite immense recent growth in the Netherlands in sanctions that can replace short prison sentences, the proportion of people admitted to prisons is relatively high by European standards because of an increased focus on less severe crimes, combined with relatively high use of pretrial detention. Many community service orders and supervision orders are imposed by prosecutors and judges for relatively minor crimes. Therefore, many sentencing decisions occur at the custody threshold, the border between custody and non-custody. The role of the probation service is crucial because it advises on sentences at all stages of the criminal justice system, including revocation of community penalties. Courts and prosecutors are largely dependent on the probation service's recommendations, capacity, and willingness to supervise offenders, which raises questions about equal and fair application of sanctions and the independence of the final decision makers.
France has experienced a moderate but steady rise in punitiveness since the early 2000s. Prosecutors, increasingly dominant, dispose of cases through alternative procedures (e.g., composition p & eacute;nale, penal orders, plea bargaining), bypassing traditional trials. These tools, intended to streamline justice, have increased the number of people under criminal justice system control, without reducing prison populations. The "rate of solved cases," a bureaucratic metric, pressures prosecutors to avoid dismissals. Single-judge trials, fast-track procedures, and police-led sanctions have proliferated. These shifts prioritize speed over fairness, eroding procedural protections and individualization. Legislation has criminalized more behaviors (initially domestic and sexual violence, more recently traffic and drug offenses) and made punishments for recidivists harsher. In practice, trial judges often do not apply the harsher laws, and judges overseeing implementation of sentences use community penalties such as electronic monitoring and probation to avoid prison overcrowding. France's system is Janus-faced, simultaneously moderate (via judicial discretion) and harsh (via prosecutorial powers and net widening).
Nordic crime policy may be at a crossroads. Imprisonment rates have fluctuated around 60 per 100,000 population for over 30 years. For most Nordic countries, that stability has endured for over 60 years, but whether it will continue is unclear. Many changes have occurred over the years but systems have remained in balance. A sizable decline in property offenses and drunk driving since the 1970s released prison beds for growing numbers of drug offenders. Increased penalties for violent and sexual offenses were offset by use of community service and electronic monitoring to replace short prison sentences. Cracks have become visible, however, in the image of moderate, expert-driven Nordic crime policy. Politicization tendencies that emerged in the 1990s have intensified, the influence of experts has declined, and criminal justice policy has become more prominent in political agendas and government programs. Increased immigration, the rise of right-wing political parties, and the emergence of serious organized crime problems have changed the political environment. Gun violence in Sweden became world news and triggered policy changes that may triple its prison population. Sensational problems and changed policies have been fewer in the other countries but are far from insignificant.
"Penal populism" and steeply rising crime rates do not make sentencing laws, policies, and practices markedly harsher and imprisonment rates rise inexorably; that happened only in the United States. Sentencing policy and practice in most European and Common Law countries and Japan have remained largely insulated from partisan politics. Imprisonment rates have been broadly stable in most Western countries and Japan for five decades. Imprisonment rates in many countries fluctuated in narrow ranges even while crime rates rose steeply in the late twentieth century. In Central and Eastern Europe, they later fell substantially. Many European countries controlled prison populations by establishing new prison alternatives based on American models. The clearest examples are community service orders, electronic monitoring, and victim-offender mediation. Explanations for why sentencing policies, processes, and practices vary substantially between countries are primarily to be found in national histories and cultures.
Compared with many other countries, Germany makes relatively little use of imprisonment, including for offenses of middle seriousness. In 2023 only 5 percent of all convicted offenders received an unconditional prison sentence. Another 10 percent received suspended prison sentences. All others had only to pay fines. This pattern has been stable for 50 years and has been accompanied in recent decades by a decreasing incidence of crime reported to the police. Scholarly attention has focused on a lack of consistency in sentencing; there are remarkable differences in average sentence lengths among local courts. The parliament, however, has chosen neither to establish a sentencing data bank nor to promulgate or move toward creation of a system of sentencing guidelines. Despite occasional media grumbling, the population at large does not seem to see a great need for a significant increase in sentencing severity. The German parliament and judiciary have by and large refrained from moving toward a more severe approach, except for some changes in authorized sentencing ranges for terrorism and sexual offenses.
Statutory provisions in Czechia provide wide discretion to judges in sentencing. Appellate courts, scholarship, and other actors provide only limited guidance on how to exercise it. The system lacks accountability and has substantial disparities. Cases are processed quickly by means of penal orders and guilty pleas, resulting in offenders' risks and needs not being sufficiently considered. Czech sentencing is dominated by suspended prison sentences that raise sizable proportionality concerns. Upon imposition they are sometimes unduly lenient, and upon revocation the prison terms served are unduly severe. Frequent imposition of suspended sentences for serious offenses including rape and serious assault results from overemphasizing the role of previous convictions. After 1989, the general part of the penal code became more lenient, and the special part concerning authorized sentences became more severe. Sentencing reforms have been piecemeal and often inconsistent, resulting in a system that lacks an overall strategy but has chronically high imprisonment rates.
Canadian imprisonment rates have not changed appreciably in the past 75 years. Canada has generally left sentencing to judges rather than impose strict directives through legislation. Yet, this stability hides considerable variability in process and objectives across historical eras. Until the turn of the twenty-first century, sentencing reform in Canada was about "doing policy." The primary objective was to make the criminal justice system more effective and fairer by resolving problems in ways that were consistent with guiding principles. More recent policy changes have been predominantly about "doing politics." The Conservative Party promoted populist tough-on-crime legislation that appealed to its political base. Liberals sought to reaffirm core values rooted in the party's agenda and ideology. Despite dramatic differences in legislation promoted by the two parties, the contrast of the past two decades with the previous historical era signals a significant change in Canada's approach to sentencing.
Most criminal laws in Japan are national in scope. Prosecutors enforce them with discretion, which they tend to exercise cautiously by charging cases only if they are all but certain to end in conviction. One result is a high conviction rate. By screening out cases that stand even a small chance of acquittal, this cautious approach limits the role that courts and defense lawyers play in the criminal process. Cases are tried before a single judge, a bench of three judges, or a lay judge panel consisting of three judges and six citizens. There are no formal sentencing guidelines, but well-established norms reflect a commitment to consistency. Recent reforms have given victims greater prominence in the sentencing process. Japan's sentencing system recognizes the limited capacity of the criminal sanction to do good, but it also can be severe, with a harsh pretrial process. Death sentences, executions, and wrongful convictions also continue to occur on a regular basis. Scholarship about Japanese criminal justice sometimes characterizes the system as lenient and benevolent. There is truth in this, but because the country has little serious crime, the sentencing system may appear more lenient than it really is.
Developments in penal policy and sentencing in Poland between 2015 and 2025 were dominated by the effects of sentencing reforms introduced in 2015 to reduce a notoriously high incarceration rate, one of the highest in Europe, and reconstitute a system of sanctions dominated, as elsewhere in Central Europe, by use of suspended sentences. The effects were mixed. The use of suspended sentences decreased dramatically, and the use of fines and community service increased greatly. Those changes had little effect, however, on the incarceration rate. One cause of previous high rates was that a large proportion of suspended sentences were revoked following breaches of conditions; defaulters were often imprisoned for longer than if they had initially received an unsuspended prison sentence. History is repeating itself: since 2015, high numbers of fine and community service defaulters have begun to fill the prisons. The Polish criminal justice system is in general becoming more punitive: use of pretrial detention and immediate imprisonment is increasing, terms are becoming longer, and early release is declining. "Democratic backsliding" in 2015-23 under the populist Law and Justice government distorted the implementation of the 2015 reforms.
The creation of sentencing councils and the introduction of guidelines have made sentencing in the United Kingdom more transparent, predictable, and democratic. The systems in England and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland share common elements, but important differences exist. Those in England and Wales are the most comprehensive. They are largely descriptive, reproducing rather than changing judicial practice, and have failed to prevent three problems: increases in sentence severity, prison overcrowding, and political interference. Prison sentence lengths have increased significantly and use of community orders has declined. Politics in England and Wales and Scotland continue to shape policy and sentencing practice. The government in England and Wales in 2025 commissioned a review of sentencing and introduced legislation to implement proposed changes, including creation of a statutory presumption against imposition of short prison sentences. Under the 2026 legislation, courts will, with some limited exceptions, have to find that "exceptional circumstances" exist before imposing a prison sentence of 12 months or less.
There are huge variations in probation and parole in Europe in how often supervisory sanctions are used and in how their use relates to the use of imprisonment. Despite large expansions in the number of people under supervision, there is little or no evidence of reductions in the use of imprisonment. Supervisory sanctions take diverse legal forms and pursue diverse purposes. Organizations that deliver supervision take many forms and operate in different ways. They have varying occupational and organizational cultures and practices. Sizable literatures examine the operation, effects, and effectiveness of supervision; results are mixed. The most consistent message is that community sanctions have somewhat lower reconviction rates than short custodial sentences. Critical attention has increasingly focused on how the "pains and gains" of supervision are experienced by those supervised and those close to them. Whatever the evidence of their effects, supervisory sanctions are likely to endure. Their use reflects key European values and prison population pressures that create political, fiscal, and social problems that require "alternatives." There is no room for complacency, however, when technological developments may be seen to offer a different kind of alternative.
The countries of Central Europe have for many years occupied a leading position in Europe in imprisonment rates and the use of imprisonment. The reasons for this may be connected to having been under authoritarian rule for many years. Another factor may be the penal populism that is influential throughout the world but has specific features in Central Europe. One such explanation, "penal nationalism," argues that exceptionalism results from a distinctive brand of nationalist attitudes, especially towards the European Union. Social welfare policies, egalitarianism, income inequality, and residents' trust in one another and the state, among other factors, have repeatedly been shown to be associated with imprisonment rates. Central European countries usually score low, sometimes very low, on these measures. Other more prosaic explanations relate to national laws and policies that increase punitiveness generally, and the use of imprisonment, even though that was not their purpose. None of these considerations by itself explains why imprisonment rates are, and long have been, comparatively high in Central Europe, especially relative to Western Europe, but provide elements from which fuller explanations may emerge.
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, DC, in the 1960s and later adopted in many places, soon languished. European equivalents were widely adopted or expanded beginning in the 1970s and remain in extensive use. The prison alternatives trajectory is similar. Community service, restitution, victim-offender mediation, and electronic monitoring all were pioneered in the United States but were later deemed insufficiently punitive and ceased being widely used. In Europe, fines are the most commonly imposed prison alternatives, followed by community service and electronic monitoring. 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.
Youth crime and other types of risk behavior have declined considerably over the last 20-30 years in many developed countries. Robust evidence comes from both official crime data and repeated self-report surveys, one of them covering 36 countries in Europe over 20 years. Since 2015, the decline appears to have leveled off, with a reversal for property crimes in some European countries. Disaggregated crime trends show some but no unequivocal signs of "polarization" between declining prevalence rates and constant or increasing incidence rates, in particular for violent offenses. They also provide conflicting signs of social or ethnic inequalities in the crime drop. Studies based on repeated cross-sectional surveys from the United States and Scandinavia, looking at microlevel proximal influences, have made progress in finding explanations of the crime drop. These studies find that declines in unstructured socializing with peers and in alcohol consumption are the two strongest predictors of declining rates of offending over time, supporting routine activity approaches. The roles of the internet and social media in social changes of adolescents' life experiences remain unclear and underexplored.
Research on immigration and crime has experienced unprecedented growth. Studies reveal that immigration is not associated with increased crime rates in many countries including the United States, Canada, and Australia. In other places such as Europe, the findings are more mixed. Yet, limitations in this body of work hamper our understanding. In particular, researchers rely too heavily on conceptual dichotomies, or mutually exclusive categorizations (e.g., foreign-born vs. native-born, documented vs. undocumented, first generation vs. second generation), which insufficiently capture nuance or layers of diversity inherent in immigrant populations. Dichotomies must be replaced with an analytical framework that incorporates multiple dimensions of immigration. Beyond foreign-born (vs. native-born) status, intersections of immigrants' legal statuses, assimilation levels, motives for migration, and settlement contexts create diverse groups whose backgrounds, experiences, and opportunities all have potential consequences for crime.
Frauds vary with opportunities and controls in Global North countries, but also elsewhere in the developed world. Fraud rates against individuals have been rising in many countries, generating pressure for more preventative work on "enablers" such as banks, social media businesses, auditors, and lawyers. There do not appear to be embedded social movements against elite white-collar crime in the United States or elsewhere, but episodic campaigns against kleptocracy and money laundering have had some effects. Except for schemes requiring banks to reimburse individual victims, and largely civil litigation against financial intermediaries and alleged fraudsters, only Italy, China, Switzerland, the UAE, and the US have generated large sums from asset forfeiture despite an international move toward tougher civil and criminal asset recovery from fraud and money laundering. Data-sharing public private partnerships are necessary but not sufficient fraud prevention approaches. Generic advertising and warnings have little effect; more targeted help offers better prospects. Social engineering of victims remains a major challenge for banks, regulators, and law enforcement. For frauds against government, more attention is needed to social network analysis behind corporate fronts. Greater skepticism among internal and external auditors to accounts provided by senior executives is also needed.
Criminologists rarely read W. E. B. Du Bois's The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899), a classic of enduring relevance. Rectifying that disciplinary blind spot requires an understanding of Du Bois's remarkable life, from a Massachusetts boyhood to Fisk, Harvard, Berlin, and ultimately Philadelphia. White philanthropists, led by Susan P. Wharton, and University of Pennsylvania officials selected him to investigate "the Negro problem" in the city's Seventh Ward. Building on Charles Booth's London study and Jane Addams/Hull-House Residents' Chicago study, Du Bois conducted 2,500 house-to-house surveys with 9,675 Black respondents. The project challenged racial stereotypes and showed that crime was the consequence of past and present discrimination. Much that he learned was specifically criminological. Decades before other scholars, Du Bois documented problems with official statistics and identified stable urban crime patterns. His insights on racial oppression lay the foundation for Black Criminology. The Philadelphia Negro has been interpreted differently across time and neglected for more than 125 years. The time has come to move it into the criminological canon and make it required reading.
The principle of less eligibility posits that assistance must be less attractive than low-wage work, and that punishment must make crime less attractive than low-wage work or welfare. Much of the literature dismisses less eligibility as outdated and reactionary. In fact, less eligibility is neither a doctrine nor a policy prescription. It assumes that individuals respond to incentives based on the relative desirability of low-wage work, assistance, and crime. Maintaining a gap in desirability between these options is structurally necessary to sustain low-wage labor supply and contain crime. The literature on the causal relations that make up less eligibility shows that increased welfare generosity decreases the labor supply for low-wage work; that making low-wage work more desirable reduces crime; and that increased welfare generosity also reduces crime. These effects are supported by a wealth of econometric evidence, suggesting the plausibility of less eligibility through robust microfoundations. The implied trade-offs are objective realities, indifferent towards normative inclinations. The main macro-level implication is to explain the oft-noted but under-theorized inverse relation between welfare and punishment.
Histories of racialized violence relate to an array of contemporary crime and criminal justice system outcomes. This was anticipated by observers by the 1830s who warned that indulgence of racist violence corrupted the rule of law. Recent studies focus on county-level variation in two forms of racial violence (i.e., violence motivated or organized by racial politics)-area histories of slavery and racial-terror lynching-theorizing that these histories shape path-dependent patterns of racialized conflict, violence, and inequality in these same places, historically and today. Studies have demonstrated legacies in attitudes, behaviors, and institutional outcomes that include patterns of violent victimization, criminal justice policy support, police violence, and state executions. Yet recent studies are surprisingly cut-off from earlier legacies of research by predominantly Black scholars and public intellectuals, which was relegated to the margins of academia. This historically long-standing understanding of racialized violence as a lingering "crime against law" has important implications for contemporary research and reparative interventions.
The continued globalization of finances has generated an ever-larger array of methods for making criminal earnings appear legitimate. The global regime to control money laundering has become more sophisticated and comprehensive, (i.e., expensive and intrusive). There is no evidence that money laundering is declining or becoming more difficult or expensive. The system's failure has many sources. Nations which pushed for its creation and development have been unwilling to implement critical elements. Major banks have repeatedly failed to meet their obligations, suggesting either insufficient commitment or a lack of the necessary skills and systems to comply. Regulatory oversight has been inadequate. There is, however, evidence that the system aids enforcement of laws against criminal enterprises. Despite the consensus that the system works poorly, there is almost no discussion of substantial reforms.
