Defining and Registering Criminal Offences and Measures - Oapen

N. Prison Population
As a part of the project goals, new questions on the prison population that are
usually not included in the available international data collections such as the
Council of Europe Annual Penal Statistics (SPACE), the European Sourcebook of Crime
and Criminal Justice Statistics, and the United Nations Survey on Crime Trends were introduced.
One of the goals was to figure out whether data on foreigners could be
broken down into foreigners holding an EU citizenship and other foreigners (also
see chapter O).
1. First steps and development of draft definitions and
questions
At the beginning it was thought about adding questions to the new questionnaire
regarding (1) the length of sentence, and (2) the use of community sentences.
It was discussed what level of detail the questionnaire should achieve, and
consequently, how it should be related to the SPACE II 56 work. There were different
possibilities: SPACE II statistics could be used with comments, they could
be summarized or the ESB could have no data on community sentences at all. In
56 See http://www.coe.int/T/E/Legal_affairs/Legal_co-operation/Prisons_and_alternatives/
Statistics_SPACE_II/.