Legal here. I think that's because of the continental legal system model. Prison in many EU countries is avoided for a lot of reasons, including statistics, wh

Legal here. I think that's because of the continental legal system model. Prison in many EU countries is avoided for a lot of reasons, including statistics, which state that crime rate doesn't correlate with punishment as much as social/economy factors. Similar to these Norway has a life-sentence limit of 20 years ( I think ). The idea behind prison in continental legal systems is to serve 2 purposes : 1a. To educate the person that committed the crime that it's actually bad 1b. To frighten the same person before the crime is committed 1c. To prevent the same person to commit a crime before he's re-educated. 2. To educate other potential crime committers what will happen if they do the same. 1a,1b,1c are individual prevention and 2 is general prevention. So ... If one of those can't be met by the punishment then punishment for that crime is not considered.