It was over 20 years ago that we began working, with Joe Sim, to put together a collection on European penal systems ( European Penal Systems: A Critical Anatomy, 1995). We were all aware, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, of the great political change that we were living through, and were therefore tempted to include some of the newly independent Eastern Bloc states in our collection. However, it soon became clear that the transition period to even what President Putin has recently called “managed democracies” was going to be a long and difficult one, and so we went ahead, limiting our collection to western European systems, and even more narrowly, to those in the European Union. We have always regretted this – how shall we put it? – confirmation of the brutal division of Europe with which we had all grown up since 1945. This collection enables us to make a timid start in overcoming this omission – a chance to catch up with history, so to speak. However, our readers will find that there is still a long way to go before a comparison between west and east Europe can be constructively made, and that differences between eastern countries themselves are, if anything, greater than between themselves and countries further west.