How is this number different from other developed nations?
> It's very common for judges to pass a community services punishment or an electronic ankle bracelet house arrest.
If recidivism is low, how is that possibly not a positive?
If people aren't in jail it doesn't mean there is no crime.
Many crimes are committed by other Europeans and Dutch criminals who commit crimes in Germany across the border. For instance ramming or exploding ATMs in Germany by Dutch organised crime happens a lot.
When looking at crime rates and amount of people in jail statistics per country are very unreliable and give the wrong impression when you should look at the big European picture.
As it is, I'm skeptical. I've spent about half my life living outside of 'Western Europe' and much of the other half in Holland. My experience at least fits the statistics: Holland is one of the safest places I've ever lived, and I usually lived (and spent a chunk of my leisure time) in the 'bad parts of town'.
With a few tiny exceptions, there are very few areas I can think of that I would avoid at night at all cost, for example. I'd go anywhere in Amsterdam at any time of the night, including the bad parts. And many of my female friends, who I'd say more at risk in general, would say the same.
This is because every single small pickpocket is reported and usually caught. Not to mention crime definitions like "breach of peace", with cases like "shouting in public" or "pointed his finger on walker". Police would laugh on a reports about these in Hungary.
I didn't like Amsterdam (or what I have seen of it) though, same insecure feeling.
Germany fares much better in this regard, about 56% gets solved I think.
The German rate ("Aufklärungsquote") (percentage of solved crimes) includes cases that, according to the police, were sufficiently looked into. They don't care whether or not a case went before a judge or not. Fun fact: The rate can even surpass 100% since its sets solved crimes and reported crimes of one period in relation. That is, crimes solved from previous periods inflate the percentage.
http://www.krimlex.de/artikel.php?BUCHSTABE=&KL_ID=23
As for the Netherlands, their rate of solved crimes in indeed quite low (< 15 % in 2002). However, they also state that in many cases they don't even try to solve a crime because of a lack of priority(?) and missing initial suspicion (2/3 of all complaints to the police!)
https://www.uni-muenster.de/NiederlandeNet/nl-wissen/politik... --
These kind of numbers are hard to interpret anyhow; they're so dependent on methodology that I'd wager their primary purpose is to influence opinion one way or the other, alas.
Consider speeding, on any given trip doing 25 over is unlikely to get caught. If you do 25 over on every trip then you will get caught. Sure, murder is investigated but many a drive by in the US goes unsolved.