Incarceration rate, or prisoners per capita, is typically used as the primary measure of a nation’s punitiveness. But measuring punitiveness is inherently more complicated. It is possible, for example, that a country developed a high incarceration rate because it has a high crime rate. That might encourage one to measure punitiveness as the incarceration rate per serious crime. But it may be that solving crimes in that country is particularly difficult because police are less competent, or perhaps because the public is less helpful to the police in solving crimes. Thus, one might augment the measures with incarceration rates per arrest. Even this measure will depend on the discretion allowed police in moving cases forward to prosecution. If such constraints are very stringent, then one might turn to the incarceration probability per conviction as a tighter measure of punitiveness. Going still further, a reasonable measure of punitiveness could be the expected time served per crime or per conviction. This last measure would take account of the duration of the sentence as well as the probability of commitment conditional on a crime, an arrest, or a conviction.

This chapter will provide an array of measures that have been explored crossnationally in Blumstein et al. based on crossnational data collected by Farrington and Tonry (2005). The data covers eight countries (UK, Scotland, USA, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Netherlands, and Switzerland) and six crime types (homicide, rape, robbery, vehicle theft, residential burglary, and assault). One limitation is that some crime-type definitions vary across the different countries. For example, some countries include under robbery all thefts while others include only thefts associated with force or threat of force.