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Have Community sanctions and measures widened the net of the European criminal justice systems?

A summary of the article written by Marcelo F Aebi, Natalia Delgrande and Yann Marguet from the University of Lausanne, published in 2015 in “Punishment & Society”, is presented below. Community Sanctions and Measures (CSM) were created to reduce the prison population and to improve offenders reintegration. Having analyzed data from 29 European countries the authors of the article want to determine whether CSMs are used as an alternative to prison or as supplementary measures. The authors state that during the last 20 years with the implementation of CSMs the number of prisoners has, in fact, increased and as a result there are more people subject to correctional control or drawn into the criminal justice system. Many researchers have described this phenomenon as the “net widening effect”. The authors of the article use the conceptualization provided by John Muncie who defines it as: “the processes whereby attempts to prevent crime and develop community-based corrections act to expand the criminal justice system and draw more subjects into its remit” (Muncie, 2001:262).

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