by Mick Ryan (Author), Mick Ryan (Author), VINCENZO RUGGIERO (Author), Joe Sim (Author)
This unique and original textbook offers undergraduates and interested professionals a much-needed description of how the penal system, including both prisons and alternatives to custody, is organized in eight major Western European countries.
Each chapter provides readers with a critical anatomy and empirical overview of the full range of penal sanctions used in each country and an analysis of how these sanctions are implemented. Using statistical data which are not widely available, contributors examine the nature of the penal population in relation to sentencing, to its class, gender and racial composition and to the nature of the offences for which individuals have been confined.
While highlighting several common trends in penal policy and strategy across Europe and seeking to assess to what extent these commonalities are being generated by the wider process of political integration, Western European Penal Systems also demonstrates that each of the eight countries has to an important extent its own culture of punishment which is constantly being reinterpreted and reworked.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 256
Edition: 1
Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
Published: 26 Sep 1995
ISBN 10: 0803977212
ISBN 13: 9780803977211
`A valuable and entertaining addition to the genre' - LCCJ Newsletter
'Offers those concerned with the comparative study of crime and justice in Europe an excellent example of how such comparison might be made.... Contributors have assembled much new and previously unpublished data and, for that reason alone, the book constitutes a good buy.... Western European Penal Systems marks a major advance in the comparative European study of crime and justice. It is packed with information, the analysis is sharp and intelligent, it holds many surprises, it is contentious and, most important for this reviewer, it offers a new and original perspective on contemporary developments in the penal system in the UK' - Critical Social Policy
'Western European Penal Systems will introduce the reader to a critical evaluation of the political forces which influence the development of penal policy' - Cambridge Review of International Affairs