In the study, the criminal justice system is seen as a unit in which various decriminalization and depenalization options are provided for and different forms of discretion at police and prosecution service level take place. Therefore, it is not easy to isolate certain levels and specific issues and to deal with the results in separate chapters. This is also true for the authorship. All results presented in this volume are the product of the joint efforts of the research group as a whole. Altogether the different chapters contribute to the aim of the study to provide for a comparative and complex overall picture of prosecution and diversion within the criminal justice systems in Europe. The comparative study is an expanded followup of the six-country study into the "Function of the Prosecution Services in Criminal Justice Systems." The powers of, above all, the prosecution services to deal with cases in alternative ways formed the heart of the study. To accomplish this comparative analysis, the development of a complex data collection instrument was necessary to allow for the identification of similarities, as well as the respective national peculiarities. The countries studied provide a fairly representative picture of the prosecution services in Europe. Large, small, eastern and western, as well as the different prosecution service types were selected. These selected countries included: England (also Wales), France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Poland, Germany, Croatia, Hungary, Spain, Switzerland, and Turkey.