How and Why Western Europe Avoided Mass Incarceration

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.