Prison Populations Part 3

Similar to week 2 I will leave my response to Xavier's question at the top of this article.

I was asked whether the statistics being used would take into account internment camps in China, or labour camps in North Korea. Additionally whether there would be stats available online that showed a longer time scale of incarceration rates in locations such as the OECD.

To answer this I found two sources. For the first question the World Prison Brief which I have been quoting thus far also gives a detailed analysis of individual countries. In this they discuss things such as internment camps and the potential effects that may have on statistics. They also give a long term breakdown of the statistics over the years complete with graphs showing the trend line over time, although it is worth noting that the statistics only go back to the year 2000. A 20 year period may be sufficient to establish links between regime types and incarceration rates although as to the certainty of this I am uncertain. They state that as of 2009 there were around 650,000 prisoners in detention centres in China, which would bring the total prison population up to around 2.3 million. (Or 164 per 100,000) This would place them at around rank 96. Whether they have more prisoners than this that are just kept secret is unknown, and any report that we create should list this as a factor if the statistics are unavailable. In regards to North Korea the WPB does give an estimate from the U.S state department that the prison population is around 80,000-120,000. Whether this is accurate I cannot say, additionally I'm not certain how many people would survive a North Korean labour camp to be kept prisoner.

In regards to long term trends in the OECD we do have another source which gives a detailed report on crime and prisoners in the OECD, this is the OECD ilibrary. The OECD ilibrary posts a "society at a glance" report which is a biannual report of several social indicators, and covers 35 OECD members in addition to other key partners and G20 nations. It provides statistical graphs such as this (total prison populations):

I found it both amusing and irritating however to discover that the statistics the OECD uses is just the same statistics from the WPB, essentially copy and pasted. So all they really did was compile it for the OECD. Perhaps the best approach would be to look at the individual country reports and discover the long term trends that way, as I discussed in regards to China.


I had a suspicion last week that the very nature of non democratic regimes being unaccountable to their populace could cause them to have lower prison populations as they lack the motivation to imprison many criminals as it would suck up state spending that they could furnish on themselves, the military, other infrastructure etc The criminals they do punish may be those that harm the state or present a threat, or just enough to keep the population from becoming outraged.

Alternatively I theorised that elements such as corruption or a lack of infrastructure (particularly) amongst poorer authoritarian nations could cause them to have a low prison population due to them lacking the capacity to effectively reduce crime.

A third theory is that the types of crimes being penalised by certain regime types may increase or decrease prison populations. Many authoritarian nations may not be as strict on certain crimes such as drugs, unlike nations that the US that, despite being democratic, criminalise things such as drugs very aggressively, which can drive up their prison populations. This is the weakest of my theories but is possible that it is a factor.


I only have time and space to investigate one of these theories this week, and so I will be investigating the first claim, that those countries with non democratic governments have high crime rates, but don't pursue the problem as aggressively as democratic countries due to a lack of accountability. I decided to investigate the homicide rate as that is the crime that is mostly likely to be prosecuted in all countries regardless of regime, and thus may be a better indicator of overall crime prevention by the various regimes. Or so my theory goes. The results that I should see is that countries with a non democratic government and a low incarceration rate would have a high homicide rate due to a lack of effective government intervention. The following list is all the non democratic countries in order from the lowest incarceration rate and then in ascending order. That is to say that the first country on the list, the Central African Republic is the non democratic country with the lowest incarceration rate per capita. On the left hand side is it's rankings in incarceration rates with 1 being the lowest globally, and on the right hand side of the list is it's rankings globally for homicide rates.

Rank 4- Central African Republic- Rank 21
Rank 7- Republic of the Congo - Rank 49
Rank 9 - Democratic Republic of the Congo - Rank 30
Rank 12 - Oman - Rank 209
Rank 18 - Mauritania - Rank 44
Rank 23 -  South Sudan - Rank 29
Rank 24 - Sudan - Rank 90
Rank 27 - Qatar - Rank 215
Rank 28 -  Yemen - Rank 76 (but take this with a grain of salt given the war)
Rank 32 - Chad - Rank 53
Rank 34 - Syria - Rank 140 (as above for Yemen)
Rank 38 -  Equatorial Guinea - Rank 132
Rank 46 -  Djibouti - Rank 77

As you can see there is a greater correlation than that with poverty from my previous post, but the link is very limited and no firm conclusions can be drawn from it.

Next time I will investigate the second theory in that poorer authoritarian countries lack the infrastructure to effectively manage crime, and I believe a more focused case by case approach is required to ascertain the possible relationship between regime and crime, if one exists at all.