International Imprisonments

Increasing prison populations and particularly prison overcrowding are important concerns in all democratic countries. The undesirable effects of overcrowding are legion, including increases in correction [Page 919]costs, longer delays before imprisonment, and deterioration in living and working conditions for inmates and correction officers. Comparison of different countries' prison statistics is not an easy task. The prison population and changes in it result from complex processes that are affected by the frequency and seriousness of offenses, police efficiency, the strictness of the law, the way judges carry out the law, and by the modes of carrying out sentences (stay of sentence, amnesty, release on parole, mandatory minimum sentences, etc.). The main indicator used to measure the number of inmates is the prisoner rate (also called “detention rate” or even “incarceration rate”). It is obtained by relating the number of prisoners on a specific date or as an annual average to the number of inhabitants in a certain country or state. The prisoner rate is generally expressed by the number of inmates per 100,000 inhabitants; it varies from about 22 in Indonesia to 694 in Russia (see Table 1). In western Europe, the 2000 prisoner rates vary between 29 (Iceland) and 124 (England and Wales).

Whereas the prisoner rate is a “stock” statistic that relates to the size and the structure of prison populations and gives a picture of the number of people who are in prison at a given time, it is often confused with the incarceration rate, which is a “flow” statistic and relates to entries into prison. To understand the difference between them, one has to include the length of the detention into the equation. Indeed, stock statistics are a composition of the flow and the length. Only the prisoner rate is used here because it is the expression of the prison situation at a given moment and includes the length as well as the flow.

The following sections examine the rates from many countries. The choice of countries examined depended on the availability of the needed data and on their interest and ability to point to factors explaining the trends in prison populations. This overview will give us some indication of the reasons for the enormous differences between countries in this respect.

Europe

This section reviews data from large nations, such as Germany and Italy, as well as data from smaller countries, such as Portugal and Finland.

Figure 1. Prisoner Rate per 100,000 Inhabitants in Italy

Italy

In Italy, the overall prisoner rate dropped from 76.3 to 57.4 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants between September 1, 1986, and February 1, 1987 (Figure 1), mainly because of a December 1986 amnesty.

The example of Italy shows that an amnesty can significantly reduce the prisoner rate in the short term. The question, though, is whether it is an appropriate way to solve the prison overcrowding problem in the middle and long terms. The Italian data suggest that an amnesty is incapable of reducing the prison population for any length of time, as the sentenced prisoner rate quickly returned to the pre-amnesty level. The overall prisoner rate did not rise for a while after the amnesty because of a decreasing pretrial detainee rate. This decrease was partly due to a change in pretrial detention law, which abolished compulsory arrest and introduced stricter conditions for pretrial detention. Therefore, the drop in corrections' populations resulting from amnesties was only temporary.

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