Crime and Punishment—Crime Rates and Prison Population in Europe

This paper presents an attempt at establishing an association between crime levels and prison populations across European countries. We observe that the situation in Central and Eastern European countries differs distinctly from the rest of Europe. Building on this, we offer justification that is methodologically based on correlations and regressions of country incarceration rates on crime rates, with reference to governance indicators. Our cross-sectional analysis uses data on crime and prisoner rates by offence from Eurostat and SPACE for the year 2018. The paper’s empirical analysis is preceded by a discussion of the challenges faced when attempting to compare crime between countries in Europe. A review of research focused on relationships between incarceration and crime follows, with the emphasis on the deterrence effect and the prison paradox. Typically, this stream of research uses microdata covering a single country or limited to a smaller geographic area. International comparisons are rare, and are usually based on time series and trend analyses. The quantitative approach applied here is based on recognizing two clusters of countries: the Central and Eastern European (CEE) cluster and the Western European (WE) cluster. We show that the observation of higher prisoner rates and lower crime rates for CEE countries is confirmed with regression analysis. Our study encompasses four types of offences: assault, rape, robbery, and theft. The final section of the paper presents an attempt to incorporate Worldwide Governance Indicators into the analysis of the association between incarceration and crime rates. The results confirm that crime rates in WE countries are distinctly higher than in CEE countries, while incarceration rates in WE are significantly lower than in CEE countries. We think this is due to a higher percentage of crimes being reported and the greater accuracy of police statistics in WE countries. The prison population in each country is largely determined by its criminal and penal policies, which differ substantially between CEE and WE countries (e.g., in terms of frequency of imposing prison sentences and the length of imprisonment). These tendencies result in higher incarceration rates in CEE countries, despite lower crime rates when compared to WE countries.