I’ve been on a China kick lately (reading and listening about its history and global position) and a crime public policy kick (reading and listening to Mark Kleiman). I was struck when I heard Mark say in an interview that the US has more people in jail in absolute terms than China. So I went about to looking for some data. I found the most comprehensive source of info in the “World Prison Population List” published by the King’s College London International Centre for Prison Studies. Their top bullet point is alarming:
More than 9.25 million people are held in penal institutions throughout the world, mostly aspre-trial detainees (remand prisoners) or assentenced prisoners. Almost half of these are inthe United States (2.19m), China (1.55m plus pre-trial detainees and prisoners in ‘administrativedetention’) or Russia (0.87m).
But I was surprised by China. The US have a 738 people in prison per 100,000 of population, Russia 611 and China 111. England and Wales has more than China with 158. In fact, more than half of the countries of the world have more than China. I did some numbers in the spreadsheet below what that means with respect to the total population of each countries (throwing in the UK, India and Brazil for good measure):
And the results could not be clearer. China is not in any way comparable to Russia and the US when it comes to prison population. In fact, the UK is a worse offender (pun intended) when it comes to owning a disproportionate chunk of the global prison population. It is just under parity. India is by far the most lenient when it comes to incarceration with only 3.5% of the world prison population to 16% of the world’d global population. The Center provides no estimate of the pre-trial and administrative detainees in China. But even if it was another half-a-million people, it would still only give China a parity. To be as disproportionately prison-happy as the US, China would have to arrest more than 2.5 as many people as it has in jail right now.
But the question arises why did the Centre for Prison Studies choose to include US, Russia and China on the same list? My suggestion is prejudice combined with number magic. The authors were trying to come up with a way to get to say that half of the prisoners are in a small number of countries. And China is “known” for its human rights record, so it must be OK to list it there if it will bump up the numbers. But in effect, they managed to lie about China by saying something numerically true. It didn’t say anything flat out incorrect but it created an implicit category which clearly labels China as a bad country. This is a silly way to affirm Western supremacy where there is none.
There are lots of other things that could be estimated based on these numbers. I couldn’t find a clear estimate of how many people were sent to prison for things they didn’t do (we can’t just extrapolate from death row exonerations) but if we set it at about 0.5%, we get that there may be more unjustly imprisoned people in the US than there are political prisoners in China (estimated at about 5,000) or slightly less if we count the same rate of miscarriage of justice across the rest of China’s prison population. This is, of course, too much guess work for drawing any firm conclusions but it certainly puts the numbers in some perspective.
UPDATE: I have actually interviewed Mark Kleiman (it was a long time ago but I only now remembered to update here) and his estimate is that there are 3-4% of people in US prisons who are there because of something they did not do (often because of police mis-behavior). Now it is important to qualify this by saying that most of these people have done other things for which they deserve to go to prison but were not caught, so the miscariage of justice is more technical than moral. But it shows the massive holes in the US vaunted “rule of law”. It is there, no doubt, when it comes to settling middle-class property and other business disputes (and by all accounts this would be very important thing to have in many countries in the Middle East and China). But it is not evenly distributed. I think it would not be completely outrageous to say that, for many of its citizens, the US is in effect a police state. Just like it could be said that for many of China’s citizens, China is not!
