Introduction

This chapter is based on two studies that aimed at analysing and comparing living conditions of prisoners in Europe in 13 countries precisely by regarding the experience of imprisonment through the human rights lens. The data used for this chapter are part of two data sets from two larger projects on the human rights situation in prisons in several European countries. The chapter focuses on some aspects of the last point. Due to the scope of the studies, there were only a few questions relating to the perception of safety and to victimisation. The chapter, the relevant variables were identified in the two data sets, re-named and some of them re-coded before combining these smaller data sets. Re-coding was necessary for some variables because some sets of answers had been broken up into finer categories for the Long-term Imprisonment project and thus had to be combined again.