By Alexis Anagnostakis
The Council of Europe’s newly published 2025 SPACE II survey offers something practitioners rarely get: a continent-wide, comparable snapshot of how European states manage offenders outside prison. Read alongside the companion SPACE I prison statistics, it tells a story with real implications for anyone working in extradition, detention conditions litigation, or sentencing advocacy.
Probation is growing as prisons run out of room
Between January 2024 and January 2025, the total number of probationers rose by 2.7% across the 32 probation services able to report comparable figures for both years. That is not happening in isolation. Almost half of Europe’s prison systems report overcrowding or near-full capacity, according to the SPACE I data released in May.
The Council of Europe’s institutional position on this is longstanding: through its Committee of Ministers and bodies including the Committee for the Prevention of Torture, it has consistently promoted alternatives to imprisonment as a means of both improving offender reintegration and relieving pressure on strained prison systems. The 2.7% figure suggests that policy is gaining traction — modestly, but measurably.
A continent of sharply different choices
What the data makes clear is that there is no single European model of criminal justice — there are dozens, and they diverge dramatically on how much they rely on community supervision versus incarceration.
At the high end, Poland recorded 652 probationers per 100,000 inhabitants, followed by Türkiye (495), Georgia (468), Armenia (430) and Albania (387). At the low end, several jurisdictions — many with more recently established probation services, concentrated in the Balkan region — registered rates below 50 per 100,000. Year-on-year movement was equally uneven: nine jurisdictions saw significant increases in probation populations, led by Armenia (+65%) and North Macedonia (+63%), while seven others saw significant falls, including Montenegro (-33%) and Georgia (-22%).
As Professor Marcelo Aebi of the University of Lausanne, who leads the SPACE research team, puts it, there is no formula for what an “appropriate” probation rate should be — the figure only becomes meaningful when weighed against a jurisdiction’s imprisonment rate. A low probation rate paired with a high imprisonment rate tells a very different story than a low probation rate in a jurisdiction that simply has less crime to manage. In roughly 78% of the 36 systems covered, probation populations already outnumber prison populations — meaning the minority of jurisdictions where the reverse is true stand out as structurally reliant on custody rather than community measures.
Demographic patterns worth watching
The survey also surfaces patterns relevant to arguments about proportionality and discrimination in sentencing. Women accounted for 10.7% of the total probation population across reporting states, compared with just 5.4% of the prison population — a gap the report attributes to differences in patterns of offending as well as in sentencing and release decisions. Foreign nationals, by contrast, were underrepresented in probation relative to prison: they made up roughly one in ten probationers but 17% of prisoners across the same jurisdictions, a disparity the report links in part to residence requirements that can make community supervision practically unavailable to non-residents.
That second finding deserves particular attention from extradition and cross-border defence practitioners. If access to community sanctions is structurally conditioned on residence, then a requested person facing surrender to, or prosecution in, a state with a residence-linked probation system may face a materially different — and more custodial — sentencing landscape than a resident of that state would for the same offence. That is not a footnote; it is an argument.
Why the methodology matters in practice
One caveat is essential for anyone citing this data in submissions: probation agencies do not all count the same unit. Some count individuals; others count cases, files, or orders — meaning a single person subject to multiple measures can be counted more than once in certain jurisdictions’ figures. Practitioners relying on these statistics in written or oral advocacy should identify which counting method underlies the figure they are citing, since it directly affects whether a rate is being over- or understated relative to jurisdictions that count individuals.
The takeaway for practice
For those of us litigating extradition, detention conditions, and proportionality before courts including Westminster Magistrates’ Court and the ECtHR, the SPACE II data is a useful corrective to assumption. A requesting state’s reliance on custody versus community sanctions is not a matter of impression — it is now measurable, comparable, and, increasingly, arguable. Where a jurisdiction sits structurally below the European norm on probation use, and above it on imprisonment, that gap belongs in submissions on Article 3 risk and disproportionate sentencing exposure, not just in academic commentary.
Source: Council of Europe, 2025 SPACE II Survey, 9 July 2026.
