Strasbourg, 08/03/2016 (Agence Europe) - The SPACE study (Statistiques Pénales Annuelles du Conseil de l'Europe, or Annual Penal Statistics of the Council of Europe), which was carried out on behalf of the Council of Europe (CoE) by the Institute of Criminology and Criminal Law of the University of Lausanne, was published on Tuesday 8 March and confirms the drop in prison overcrowding.
The figures, which were collected from 50 of the 52 prison services of the 47 member states of the CoE on 1 September 2014, have fallen from 99 prisoners per 100 places in 2011 to 96 in 2013 and 94 in 2014.
The prison population rate fell by 7% in 2014 compared to the previous year, from 134 inmates per 100,000 inhabitants to 124. Even so, Europe's prisons remain close to saturation, with a total of 1,600,324 people being detained.
The number of prison services suffering from overcrowding has dropped considerably, from 21 in 2013 to 13 in 2014, but it is worth noting that a number of countries still recorded a worrying rate. These - in decreasing order of the gravity of the situation - were: Hungary, Belgium, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Greece, Albania, Italy, Spain (not including Catalonia), Slovenia, France, Portugal, Serbia, Romania and Austria.
The study also showed that non-custodial measures are still very rarely used instead of imprisonment, which - along with long sentences - is contributing to prison overcrowding, said Marcelo Aebi, lecturer in criminology at the University of Lausanne, who was in Strasbourg to present the study.
The study also shows that foreign nationals represented 21.7% of the prison population (with a steep differential between the countries of Central and Eastern Europe - never more than 10%) and those of southern and western Europe (between 25% and 96%). Of these foreign detainees, 34.6% were citizens of the European Union. “This is a factor to be highlighted in the current anti-migrant context”, Aebi stressed.
When asked about the impact of the economic crisis of 2008 on the rising prison population, Aebi said that no particular affect had been identified. “This is the major difference between Europe and many other regions: our social security systems and the related unemployment insurance mean that people can survive without drifting into crime”, he added. (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)
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