“…Instead of increasing the number of cells and expanding the prison system as done by countries like the USA, England or the Netherlands, German lawyers, jurists, psychiatrists and criminologists call for specific measures to shorten or even avoid imprisonment. For example, the Scandinavian countries were able to significantly reduce their imprisonment rates (Dü nkel & Geng 2003). The model appears to be a winÁwin strategy: on the one hand, it greatly reduces the maintenance costs; on the other hand, the extreme interference with the private and social life of the offender, as well as the psychosocial consequential losses for the imprisoned and his relatives, are minimized.…”