This trend is not restricted to Europe. US states like New York have seen their prison numbers decline since 2000. Although the causes remain contested, what is clear is that investing in drug treatment programmes for nonviolent offenders, rather than custody, contributed to the drop. More recently Texas has curbed its prison binge through, amongst other things, an expansion of treatment and diversion programmes and reforms to the use of breach.
While some may hit back that the crime drop in England and Wales is due to higher levels of prison this flouts international evidence. Comparative studies find no straightforward relationship between the size of the prison population in a country and the level of recorded crime. An EU study by Van Dijk and colleagues concluded that “sentencing policies in Europe as a whole are considerably less punitive than in the USA… and yet crime is falling just as steeply in Europe as it is in the USA. No relationship between the severity of sentencing of countries and trends in national levels of crime is therefore in evidence.”
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