Global Imprisonment: Comparative Analyses of Punishment and Penality

SOCI254: Lecture 4 Global Imprisonment: comparative analyses of punishment and penality Outline 1. Introduction: The regulation of global punishment and imprisonment 2. Global, European and American incarceration: seven core trends 3. Comparative analysis: A note of caution 4. Towards accounting for differential patterns of punishment and imprisonment: three key relations 5. Punishment by death: comparative analysis Introduction - Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948 - International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights 1976 (UN) - European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms 1950 (Council of Europe) - American Convention on Human Rights 1969 - African Charter on Human and People’s Rights 1981 - Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment 1975 (UN) - United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners 1955 - And a much wider corpus of international law / many other international standards… - Above are some of the KEY indicators - Does not provide a consistency of practice Global imprisonment Global, European and American incarceration trends: prison population: World prison population data the most up to date its useful. - At the end of September 2018 (the latest data available): More than 10.74 million people are known to be detained in prisons in the world (including pre-trial detainees/remand prisoners) - The actual figure is almost certainly higher given that figures for Eritrea, Somalia and the Democratic People’s Republic of (North) Korea are not available and those for China and Guinea Bissau are incomplete - Prison populations vary considerably between different countries and regions (and within different countries and regions) - There are more than 2.1 million prisoners in the USA - There are more than 1.65m prisoners in China (plus an unknown number in pre-trial detention or ‘administrative detention’) - There are approximately 690,000 prisoners in Brazil, 583,000 in the Russian Federation, 420,000 in India, 364,000 in Thailand, 249,000 in Indonesia - We lock up a lot of people in the world Imprisonment rates: - Rates rather than numbers are much better for the purposes of comparative analysis - Gives a more accurate comparative indicator - Significant variations in international incarceration rates, for example: - USA - 655/100,000 of general population (much bigger population) - El Salvador – 604/100,000 - Thailand 526/100,000 SOCI254: Lecture 4 - Cuba – 510/100,000 Russian Federation - 402/100,000 53% of the world’s countries - incarceration rate below 150/100,000 The world prison population rate is estimated by the un to be 145/100,000 5x more likely to be locked up in America than half of the world Inter- and intra- continental/regional variations: Median incarceration rates per 100,000 general population (world rate 145/100,000) - Africa - Western African countries 53. Southern African countries 244. - The Americas - South American countries 233. Central American countries 316. - Asia - South Central Asia (mainly the Indian sub-continent) 88. Central Asian countries 160.5. - Europe – Western European countries 81. Countries spanning Europe and Asia (including the Russian Federation and Turkey) 268. - Oceania (including Australia and New Zealand) 182.5. - 5x more likely to be locked up in southern African states than northern - Differences between countries and continents Penal expansions: - Overall, since 2000, the world’s prison population has grown but the patterning of such growth is uneven - Overall, since 2000, the world’s prison population has grown but the patterning of such growth is uneven - The total prison populations in Oceania have increased by 86%, in the Americas by 41%, in Asia by 38% and in Africa by 29% - In contrast, the total prison population in Europe has decreased by 22% (reflecting large falls in central and eastern Europe) - In 2015 (‘World Prison Population List’, 11th edition) Walmsley reported that: The female prison population had increased by 50% (since 2000) - The male prison population had increased by 18% (also since 2000) - Overtime we appear to lock more people up - Decrease prison population in Europe - Significantly more men in prison than women, 95% men in UK, rate of increase is higher for women than it is for men despite numbers being higher for men Comparative Analysis: a note of caution - Comparative analysis is important in order to begin to understand the conditions – social, economic, political and cultural – that give rise to variable rates of imprisonment - What can be learnt from the experience of others? - Nation state sovereignty v economic and political ‘globalisation’? - BUT comparative analysis is also fraught with conceptual and methodological complexities and problems. - Accurate comparative statistical analysis is extraordinarily difficult - Statistics are often difficult to obtain and/or interpret and none are beyond dispute - Problems of strict comparability and complexities of what ‘difference’ signifies - The classification and recording of ‘crime’ differs as do judicial systems - What is classified as penal custody in one country may not be in others SOCI254: Lecture 4 - Not all countries collect the same data on the same age groups over the same periods of time Linguistic differences and variable ‘meanings’ pose additional difficulties Despite the challenges there is developing interest in comparative analysis within academic criminology, sociology and policy analysis 3 Key relations - The crime – prison relation - The welfare – prison relation, whats the difference between the welfare state - The political instability – prison relation The crime- prison relation - There is no strong correlation between overall reported crime rates and prison rates. - High prison rates do not necessarily induce low overall crime rates. - Trends in crime do not constitute the primary explanation for the rise in the number of prisoners in many countries. - The rise is primarily the result of the politicisation of crime and a deliberate and hardening shift in law, policy and practice. - ‘There is not and never has been, in my opinion, any direct correlation between spiralling growth in the prison population and a fall in crime . . . Crime fell throughout most of the western world in the 1990s. Crime fell in countries that had and still have far lower rates of imprisonment than ours.’ (Kenneth Clarke, UK Justice Secretary, 2010) The political instability- prison relation Ruddell, R. (2005) ‘Social disruption, state priorities, and minority threat: A cross-national study of imprisonment’, Punishment and Society, 7(1) pp. 7-28 Punishment by death: - Trend data 2009-18 – the death penalty, executions and abolition - 2. Comparative methods of execution - 3. The fallacy of the deterrence argument - 4. The execution of the innocent