Recording Community Sanctions and Measures and Assessing Attrition: A Methodological Study on Comparative Data in Europe

Abstract

This report presents the results of a project aiming at “Developing a Methodology to Collect Data on Community Sanctions and Measures and Attrition Rates in Europe” (DECODEUR). It was funded by an EU action grant4 and carried out by the experts group for the European Sourcebook of Crime and Criminal Justice Statistics (ESB) together with experts from CEP, the Confederation of European Probation. The first project goal was to improve and complement data collection on the tasks and work of probation agencies and on community sanctions and measures. Categories appropriate for a comparison across Europe were developed and data availability was documented. The second goal was to develop a measure for the attrition process taking place between the police level and the level of courts or prisons. The project aimed at finding ways to define a comparable real or approximated attrition rate for data collection and comparison.