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Influences on the Prisoner Rate: Number of Entries into Prison, Length of Sentences and Crime Rate

NCJ Number
182028
Journal
European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research Volume: 8 Issue: 1 Dated: March 2000 Pages: 65-75
Author(s)
Marcelo F. Aebi; Andre Kuhn
Date Published
March 2000
Length
11 pages
Annotation
This article attempts to determine what most influences the prisoner rate.
Abstract
On the basis of data in the European Sourcebook, the article tries to determine what most influences the prisoner rate: the number of entries into prison, the length of sentences or the crime rate. The article shows that the crime rate is absolutely not correlated with the prisoner rate. The latter depends principally on the length of the imposed custodial sanctions and secondly on the number of those imposed prison sentences. The incarcerations (number of entries) could be a better explanatory factor of the prison population than the length of the imposed sentences for the most serious crimes, whereas the length could be a better explanatory factor for less serious crimes. Nevertheless, some indications suggest that these results could be different from one type of offense to another. This hypothesis should be verified crime by crime by trying to get the partial prison population for each crime and by looking at which independent variable explains the largest part of its variance. This hypothesis could not be tested on the basis of the European Sourcebook data. Notes, tables, figures, references