Foreword: Alternatives to Imprisonment - Recent International Developments

Abstract

In recent years, international crime trends have been relatively stable or declining.A recent report from the United Nations noted that At the global level, violent crimes for which police-recorded data are available (intentional homicide, robbery and rape) have slightly decreased over the past decade.The decrease has clearly been more pronounced for property crimes: motor vehicle theft almost halved, and burglary has been reduced by more than a quarter.Criminal offences related to drug trafficking remained relatively stable over time, while drug possession offences showed a marked increase since 2003 (a 13 per cent increase).1 Surprisingly, however, this trend has not reduced the use of custody as a sanction.Many jurisdictions continue to report high rates of imprisonment.A recent report concluded that Despite the global downward trends in crime, between 2000 and 2015 prison populations rose unrelentingly by almost 20 percent-a rate slightly higher than the world population growth over the same period.The number of women and girls in prison worldwide increased by 53 percent between 2000 and 2017. 2 This paradoxical state of affairs-falling or stable crime rates and rising prison populations-has triggered an international search for increasingly effective, alternatives to imprisonment.Further, the financial crisis of 2008-2009 provided an additional impetus for the movement towards greater use of alternatives.As with most other public services, criminal justice budgets in all nations have been cut repeatedly in recent years.This special issue of Law and Contemporary Problems explores recent experiences in several Western nations.Contributing authors explore a range of alternative sanctions and programs, and draw conclusions about their relative effectiveness.Much of the literature on alternatives is specific to a single jurisdiction; there has been insufficient learning across boundaries, despite the

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 22 citations exist upstream.