ILONA SPURE sighs with regret when she recalls how, in Soviet times, a thief could get two years in prison for pilfering a jar of jam. Now the director of Latvia’s prison service, she says that even after the country regained independence in 1991 it kept the Soviet habit of putting a lot of people behind bars. In 2004, when it joined the EU, Latvia still had its highest rate of incarceration: 337 people per 100,000, compared with the EU average of 122.
“We thought there was no alternative to prison,” says Ms Spure. No longer. In recent years judges have been handing out ever more “community work service”, in which offenders perform unpaid jobs like sprucing up shabby buildings or cleaning parks. Last year such punishments were applied in 53% of convictions, up from 28.5% in 2011 and none at all before 1999.
In this way Latvia is part of a broader pattern. The use of alternative sentences, such as community service and electronic monitoring, has been rising across Europe. In the early 1990s few countries bothered to collect data on what were then rare sentences. By 2010, however, 17 out of 29 countries…
