The SPACE I 2018 annual report is part of the SPACE project. This project provides an overview of the use of custodial (SPACE I) and non-custodial (SPACE II)2 sanctions and measures in the Member States of the Council of Europe (CoE) by means of two annual reports.

SPACE I focuses on prison populations and the penal institutions in which they are held. Data for the SPACE I report are collected by means of a questionnaire agreed by the Council for Penological Co-operation (PC-CP) of the CoE and sent every year by the research team of the University of Lausanne (UNIL) to the Prison Administrations of the CoE Member States. The aim is to obtain data that are comparable across States. However, any comparisons of the levels (in rates, ratios and percentages) shown by the countries according to different indicators are always problematic and must be conducted very cautiously. This is due to the fact that the way in which data are collected in different countries varies from country to country. These variations in the data collection methods introduce artificial differences across countries. For that reason, since 2004, the SPACE I questionnaire includes questions on the way in which data are collected (known as metadata) in each country, which help explain these artificial differences between countries. Thus, the questionnaire aims at identifying, and whenever possible reducing, differences in the way in which categories are defined and data are gathered in the national statistics of each country.