Combining data from police statistics and crime victim surveys, this article analyses the evolution of crime in Western Europe from 1988 to 2007. The results show that there is no general drop in crime. Property offences and homicide have been decreasing since the mid 1990s, while violent and drug offences have increased during the period under study. These trends highlight the limits of the explanations to the crime drop in the United States, which are based on the premise of a correlation in the evolution of all offences. The drop in property offences seems related to changes in the socioeconomic situation in Europe as well as to increases in security measures in households, and the reinforcement of private security. The increase in violent offences can be explained by the combination of several factors, including changes in youth's free time provoked by the development of the Internet, changing demographics, and the rise of episodic heavy alcohol consumption and street gangs.

Community service, along with other new sanctions, has been recommended in many Western countries as an alternative to incarceration over many years. Despite a rich literature on evaluations of so-called alternative sanctions, random assignment has only exceptionally been used in this field, and (short-term) imprisonment has never been an option in such designs. The present study tried to assess the comparative effects of community service and prison sentences of up to 14 days, through a controlled experiment in Switzerland in which 123 convicts have been randomly assigned. The results show no difference with respect to later employment history and social and private life circumstances. However, re-arrest by the police was more frequent among those randomly assigned to prison than among those selected for community service. Prisoners also developed more unfavourable attitudes towards their sentence and the criminal justice system. Community service orders and other 'alternative' sanctions have, over the last 25 years, gained considerably in popularity in most Western countries (Morris

Killias, M. Effects of drug substitution programs on offending among drug-addicts. Oslo (Norway), 2009.

Analysing the evolution of imprisonment and community sanctions in Europe from 1990 to 2010 this article tests whether community sanctions have been used as alternatives to imprisonment or as supplementary sanctions. The results show that both the number of persons serving community sanctions and the number of inmates have continuously increased in almost all European countries during the period studied. A comparison with the evolution of crime rates shows that the latter cannot explain such trends and suggests that, instead of being alternatives to imprisonment, community sanctions have contributed to widening the net of the European criminal justice systems. The analyses also show a wide diversity in the use of community sanctions across Europe where, in 2010, the ratio between inmates and persons serving community sanctions varied from 2:1 to 1:3. In a comparative perspective, Finland, Norway and Switzerland seem to have found a reasonable balance between the use of imprisonment and community sanctions.

This article analyses rates and correlates of homicide in 15 West European countries from 1960 to 2010. The results show that the levels of homicide in 2010 and the trends in homicide from 1960 to 2010 are not related to any of the traditional demographic and socioeconomic predictors of crime. Homicide victimization rates show an increase from the mid-1960s until the early 1990s, and a decrease since then. Victims of both genders and all group ages follow the same trend, except in the case of infanticide, which decreased during the whole period. These results do not support the hypothesis of a homicide trend driven by the evolution of victimization of young men in public space. The authors propose an explanation based on a lifestyle approach.