Marcelo F. Aebi

Does Community Service Rehabilitate better than Short‐term Imprisonment?: Results of a Controlled Experiment

Community service, along with other new sanctions, has been recommended in many Western countries as an alternative to incarceration over many years. Despite a rich literature on evaluations of so-called alternative sanctions, random assignment has only exceptionally been used in this field, and (short-term) imprisonment has never been an option in such designs. The present study tried to assess the comparative effects of community service and prison sentences of up to 14 days, through a controlled experiment in Switzerland in which 123 convicts have been randomly assigned. The results show no difference with respect to later employment history and social and private life circumstances. However, re-arrest by the police was more frequent among those randomly assigned to prison than among those selected for community service. Prisoners also developed more unfavourable attitudes towards their sentence and the criminal justice system.

Crime Trends in Europe from 1990 to 1996: How Europe Illustrates the Limits of the American Experience

In the Council of Europes European Sourcebook of Crime and Criminal Justice Statistics, crime and other relevant data are assembled for 36 European countries and the years 1990 to 1996. The data show that crime trends differed from those in the United States. Particularly drug and violent offences continued to increase until the end of the period under consideration (1996). Most of the theoretical explanations of crime trends currently in vogue in the United States seem of little help in understanding current European trends. Generally the most valid approaches seem to be routine-activities and situational explanations.

Crime Trends in Western Europe according to Official Statistics from 1990 to 2007

The so-called crime drop observed in the United States since the beginning of the 1990s led to an impressive number of publications in which different criminologists provide various and sometimes contradictory explanations for an evolution of crime that they had not foreseen. 1 Since 2006, some authors (e.g. van Dijk, 2006; van Dijk, van Kesteren and Smit, 2007; Rosenfeld and Messner, 2009; Farrell et al., 2011) suggest that there is also a crime drop in Europe. However, analyses of victimization studies, police statistics on offences recorded by the police and conviction statistics on persons convicted by the courts show that there is no general crime drop, because property crime and violent crime are following different trends (Aebi and Linde 2010, 2012a). As a consequence, the European debate — summarized by Tonry (2010) — should focus first on establishing the actual evolution of crime trends and, only after that, on providing explanations for that evolution.

Have community sanctions and measures widened the net of the European criminal justice systems

Analysing the evolution of imprisonment and community sanctions in Europe from 1990 to 2010 this article tests whether community sanctions have been used as alternatives to imprisonment or as supplementary sanctions. The results show that both the number of persons serving community sanctions and the number of inmates have continuously increased in almost all European countries during the period studied. A comparison with the evolution of crime rates shows that the latter cannot explain such trends and suggests that, instead of being alternatives to imprisonment, community sanctions have contributed to widening the net of the European criminal justice systems. The analyses also show a wide diversity in the use of community sanctions across Europe where, in 2010, the ratio between inmates and persons serving community sanctions varied from 2:1 to 1:3. In a comparative perspective, Finland, Norway and Switzerland seem to have found a reasonable balance between the use of imprisonment and community sanctions.

Learning Through Controlled Experiments: Community Service and Heroin Prescription in Switzerland

Europe, over the past two decades, has seen many innovations in the field of corrections, particularly new sanctions that are becoming increasingly popular as alternatives to imprisonment, such as community service. Innovative approaches have also been tested in the field of drug treatment, including large-scale drug-substitution programs. Usually, such programs have been evaluated, if at all, under the form of before-after studies. Thus, little is known about treatment effects, particularly in the longer run and/or compared to alternative approaches. Two controlled experiments conducted recently in Switzerland involving community service and heroin prescription to addicts may indicate a shift to more rigorous evaluations. They both illustrate the potentials of controlled experiments for progress in knowledge as well as some problems in methodological, legal, ethical, and practical respects. Whereas controlled experiments are necessary to learn in some areas, more conventional before-after studies may be valid under particular circumstances.

Regional Variation in Europe Between Homicide and Other Forms of External Death and Criminal Offences

This chapter analyzes the relationship between homicide and other external causes of death such as suicide, motor vehicle traffic accidents and work-related accidents across Europe. It also compares homicide to other violent offences and to property offences. The comparison is both cross-sectional and longitudinal, identifying regional variations in rates and trends from 1970 to 2008, unless in the cases where data are available only for shorter periods of time. Data are taken mainly from the World Health Organization Statistics, the European Sourcebook of Crime and Criminal Justice Statistics and the Council of Europe Annual Penal Statistics. The findings suggest that opportunity-based theories provide the more plausible explanation of regional differences and trends in the various measures studied.

Effects of Heroin Prescription on Police Contacts among Drug-Addicts

Switzerlands programme of opiate prescription to drug-addicts has been thoroughly evaluated under many aspects. The results published so far on the final findings, covering the programmes first year of operation, have focused on self-reported delinquent acts and victimisation reported during interviews. This article addresses these two issues. How did police recorded crime develop over time, taking the offence type into account? Have these trends been affected by changing police control over the addicts participating in the programme? In other words, has an eventual drop been produced by less strict crime reporting (or recording) practice for programme participants, rather than by lower crime rates among this group? The analysis reported here confirms the results based on self-reported delinquency and victimisation data. According to police files, the drop in serious property offences was indeed comparable. As it turned out, this drop is not due to reduced probabilities of the police recording offences committed by programme participants after their admission to heroin prescription.

Aging Prisoners in Switzerland: An analysis of Their Health Care Utilization.

Objective: This study assessed health care utilization of aging prisoners and compared it with that of younger prisoners. Method: Health care utilization comprised visits to general practitioners (GPs), nurses, and mental health professionals (MHPs) for a period of 6 months. Using retrospective study design, data were extracted from medical records of 190 older prisoners (50 years and older) and 190 younger inmates (18-49 years). Age group was a dichotomous predictor variable with type of sentencing and time spent in prison as covariates. Descriptive statistics and generalized linear mixed models (GLMMs) were performed. Results: For each of the three outcome variables, two GLMMs were constructed. The first model only included age group as the predictor variable (3 × Unadjusted models). The second included the two covariates in addition to the predictor variable (3 × Adjusted model). Results from the adjusted model indicate that visits to GPs significantly differed between the two age groups (p = .022). Older prisoners visited GPs 1.43 times more often than younger prisoners over the 6-month period (adjusted risk ratio [RR] = 1.43, 95% confidence interval [CI] = [1.05, 1.94]). The finding for visits to nurses was not statistically significant (p = .080). However, older prisoners visited nurses 1.36 times more frequently (adjusted RR = 1.36, 95% CI = [0.96, 1.91]). Finally, older prisoners visited MHPs 1.24 times more often than younger prisoners (adjusted RR = 1.24, 95% CI = [.95, 1.61]) and this finding was also not statistically significant (p = .11). Discussion: Study findings underline that older prisoners utilized health care more often than younger prisoners although in most models the finding did not reach statistical significance. The prison system must develop solutions to address the needs of an aging population, particularly those with physical and mental health problems.

The persistence of lifestyles: Rates and correlates of homicide in Western Europe from 1960 to 2010

This article analyses rates and correlates of homicide in 15 West European countries from 1960 to 2010. The results show that the levels of homicide in 2010 and the trends in homicide from 1960 to 2010 are not related to any of the traditional demographic and socioeconomic predictors of crime. Homicide victimization rates show an increase from the mid-1960s until the early 1990s, and a decrease since then. Victims of both genders and all group ages follow the same trend, except in the case of infanticide, which decreased during the whole period. These results do not support the hypothesis of a homicide trend driven by the evolution of victimization of young men in public space. The authors propose an explanation based on a lifestyle approach.

The level of attrition in domestic violence: A valid indicator of the efficiency of a criminal justice system?

This article studies the process of attrition through a follow-up of all cases of domestic violence registered by the police forces of one Swiss canton in the first half of 2012 (N = 592) as they pass to the prosecution and the court stage of criminal justice proceedings. The results show that the attrition rate found in Switzerland (80 percent) is lower than the rate usually found in the United Kingdom. This rate is explained by the fact that domestic violence is usually treated by academics as a homogeneous construct, but it is in fact composed of a large variety of offences and, in practice, the vast majority of those that are reported to the police would not entail a custodial sentence.