Over at Foreign Policy magazine’s new blog, Davide Berretta posts some comparative prison statistics. The results are pretty surprising. The United States locks of 2,135,901 folk, or 0.724 percent of its population. China, meanwhile, locks up only 1,548,498, or 0.118 percent of its population.
Perhaps even more odd is that Japan–Japan!–actually locks up a full 0.60 percent of its population.
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23 Comments
…and all those Europeans say we, in the US, don’t do anything for the poor…. Eat your heart out. America’s #1.
i wonder how these numbers would break down in terms of the actual types of crimes. how many people in japan are in jail for drugs, for example? how many americans are behind bars for speaking out against the government on MSN blogs?
i heard that the guys on death row in japan are never told when they are going to be killed. the families are not told either — they just show up on family day and are told that they shouldn’t have bothered. cruel system.
Can anyone guess why the prisons of China are so airily free of prisoners? No doubt mahathir_fan will enlighten us soon.
And 99.9% of North Koreans are political prisoners.
A huge number of the incarcerated in the US are there for durg offenses; China executed drug offenders.
”i heard that the guys on death row in japan are never told when they are going to be killed. the families are not told either — they just show up on family day and are told that they shouldn’t have bothered. cruel system. ”
Obviously you heard a false information.
“Executions in Japan are arbitrary and are carried out in secret. The prisoner is told less than two hours before execution, and the families and lawyers are never told of the decision to carry out the death penalty. Most prisoners are under sentence of death for many years, and endure considerable mental distress…. The practice of not informing prisoners until the last hour of their execution deprives them of the opportunity to meet with family for final farewells, and makes it impossible for lawyers to file last-minute appeals.”
http://www.amnesty.org.uk/news/press/13505.shtml
genie201,
i read it, too.
That information — regarding the Japanese system — is dishonorable and an action that I would not have attributed to Japanese society. Why don’t they just chop their heads off with swords then or just torture them to death — oh wait, that *is* torture!
I have long heard that the Korean system is similar — no set execution-date, very little notice before sentence is carried out, no advance notice to family-members. Is this not true, does anybody here know for sure?
Pending exections are often “saved” during a President’s term, then carried out just before it ends. The condemmed man never knows if he’ll get a merciful commutation for one of the National-Holiday Amnesty gestures, or suddenly be ordered to the gallows.
Definitely, the not-knowing-wait is intended as enhancement of the punishment…
I need to clarify something about China’s penal system, yet another topic people with little knowledge invariably make assinine and ignorant comments on. The Chinese penal system has several administrative layers, most prominently the official population presently sentenced and under incarceration and the “reform through labour” system more popularly known as the Laogai. Those incarcerated in China’s official prison system are there having met a certain number of qualifications first. They are prisoners pending execution, prisoners serving life sentences, prisoners serving a minimum of 10 years, and foreign and female prisoners. Those serving lesser sentences are not incarcerated persay but sentenced to Reform through labour. Though prisoner conditions vary depending upon location, these are hardly the gulags some people make them out to be, but merely another aspect of China’s criminal justice system.
The average sentence served through reform through labour is if I remember correctly 2 years with the possibility of being “retained” after the sentence is served to work while being paid. The size of Laogai population is disputed, with dissidents such as Harry Wu claiming up to 20 million. However, the likely size of China’s reform through labour system is almost certainly a fraction of that, possibly 2 million or so. While Wu has personal experience in the system, his claims on the total population is based on spurious unsupported claims and emotion. While the total population of the reform through labour system is uncertain, what is not is the total number of law enforcement personnel within China. In 1991 according to a report from the US DOJ, China had 200,000 uniformed prison officers. Using even a relatively high 10 to 1 prisoner to guard ratio leaves China with roughly 2 million prisoners. In the United States, the norm for inmates to correctional officers is primarily 4 to 1. (California’s prison population is over 160,000 to an estimated 42,000 correctional officers). To approach dissident figures, China would need an inmate to guard ratio of nearly 100 to 1 which is simply impossible due to the guards being overwhelmed and the likelyhood of prison insurrection especially considering the rampant abuse within the Chinese criminal justice system. Political prisoners are a minority of the total incarcerated population and the output of Chinese prison labour is negligible. In fact I believe that they, like non-privatized U.S. prisons, are generally loss-making.
Didn’t have time to read the responses beyond a brief skim of the first 5 or so, but can think back to discussions at universities in the US about this and hearing it elsewhere.
One reason the US prison population is so large is — we actually lock people up.
I think it would do Korean society a world of good to have some jails (as oppossed to longer term prisons) filled with large numbers of the people who routinely bash the hell out of the riot police every other week in Korea’s (semi) violent protest culture. I’d like to see a lot them arrested, booked, held for a day or two, and have fines not only placed on them but upheld in court.
And we recently heard how it would be a pretty good idea if Korea locked up child molestors and rapists.
We could say the same for domestic dispute.
Which is one area in which the US jail and prison system has grown a lot in my lifetime when American society thought it was a good idea to make special law to cover this siutation that had been one of “what goes on behind closed doors of the home stays there.”
A police officer coming reponding to an altercation with neighbors or strangers in the street or best friends outside a bar has some discretion on whether one or both of them will spend some time in jail and end up in court.
With domestic dispute, most of that discretion goes out the door. If there is sign of violence, somebody’s getting locked up.
And if I compare that to how a husband in the past could beat the hell out his wife and have virtually no fear —- I prefer the “lock up” method.
Corruption is another problem in all nations but frequently cited as a much bigger problem in most other nations that have not reach the top tier of economic and social development.
I’d rather live in a society that tends to sue at the drop of a hat and actually arrest and locked people up who commit crimes than one in which the courts are too corrupt and the police are more concerned about kick backs or are used as a strong arm of the regime.
The part that annoys me about this conversation in the US and probably Western educated circles is the line about how the high prison population in the US is a sign of ill treatment of the poor or underclass.
That pisses me off.
For every drug dealer, mugger, thief, burgler, or crack head trying anything to get a fix in a poor area, there are plenty of other people who get by in life without turning to crime.
Gosh, there are even plenty of people in those same communities who manage to be part of the working class and find a way to make life worth living. I understand to most of the college crowd, the idea of working in a factory is just the same as being sent to Pelican Bay (maximum security prison), but milllions of people (billions around the world) manage to do so without putting a gun in their mouth and pulling hte trigger.
And a very high percentage of them do so without deciding to sell drugs or break into people’s homes or steal cars or as in one city yesterday in the US - chase one of those college students through the street to mug him and watch him get flattened by a car in the street.
This isn’t a ultra-nationalistic defense of American society beyond all reason.
If we started talking about the gangster nature of health care in the US, you’d hear plenty of America bashing from me.
But, after turning the “America: land of the incarcerated” around for while, I’ve become pretty dissatisfied with what I’ve usually heard about it in the past.
I’m not very familiar with China, but wouldn’t China be a better place for citizens if the police were given the duty and laws and court system to handle crime rather than spending too much time keeping a political eye on people and working more as the personal assistants of the local strong man?
Wouldn’t many places be better if they would do as the United States and others have in changing the mentality (and laws and courts) when it comes to sex crimes and domestic violence?
I guess what I am saying in part is —– where are the national examples that give a definative answer to why the US prison population is obviously such an undeniable outrage? And besides quoting how this or that nation must be better because it has fewer people in jail or prison, I need some better idea of why that is proof the situation in that nation is better….
Also, on the non-pro US side —— the US prison population would be a lot less if we could adapt some of Korean society’s patience for “enduring” semi-violence from our friends, family, or strangers in the street —- without stabbing, shooting, or beating each other to death (or close to it) as much as we do each year……..
sanshinseon wrote:
I have long heard that the Korean system is similar — no set execution-date, very little notice before sentence is carried out, no advance notice to family-members. Is this not true, does anybody here know for sure?
Pending exections are often “saved” during a President’s term, then carried out just before it ends. The condemmed man never knows if he’ll get a merciful commutation for one of the National-Holiday Amnesty gestures, or suddenly be ordered to the gallows.
Don’t know if what you describe was ever true or not, but if such a practice really did exist, it existed past tense since Korea hasn’t executed anyone in over eight years.
The unofficial moratorium on executions began with President Kim Daejung, a Roman Catholic who himself had been sentenced to death (I can hear Baduk writing a psychosis-dripping post right now).
South Korea is close to abolishing the death penalty, but some criminals are still being sentenced to death, so it’s not entirely correct to say Korea is free of capital punishment.
Kind of puts North Korea into perspective, with its 1% of the population in gaol.
Russia, North Korea, Belarussia, USA - kind of just trips off the tongue…
usinkorea, I agree with much of what you wrote, except I worry that locking up the violent activists will just give them street creds.
About this:
We could say the same for domestic dispute.
Which is one area in which the US jail and prison system has grown a lot in my lifetime when American society thought it was a good idea to make special law to cover this siutation that had been one of “what goes on behind closed doors of the home stays there.”
The DOJ has these descriptions:
Violent Property Drug Public order
1980 173,300 89,300 19,000 12,400
2002 624,900 253,000 265,100 87,500
Increase in non-violent crime accounts for half a million new incarcerations in the past two decades (some of which could be domestic disputes) and violent crime is also an increase of nearly half a million (some of which could be domestic disputes).
I guess what I’m saying is that the more intense treatment of domestic disputes seems to explain only a fraction (perhaps a significant fraction) of the disparity. Maybe we also have greater enforcement in the US, maybe we spend too much time and energy incarcerating drug-related crimes… maybe other factors. At any rate, 0.7% of the population is a very high number.
I agree, and a discussion like this is useful, but most discussion around the topic is not.
I think a big factor in the reason the US has such a high percentage is the fact that we are a very court oriented society —– we put people in jail and we sue each other for “offenses” like a national sport.
It isn’t all good, but I’d rather live in a society where the police lock up too many people for real crimes than one in which people get away with much more crime and the police are much more corrupt than in the US (which has a fair amount of corruption itself).
On the drug issue, I have ultimately gotten an increasing amount of intolerance for how it usually goes too.
If wall we were talking about was pot, fine. But then, I’d have to make a distinction between people selling pot and those using it.
This is one of the huge beefs I had with an otherwise terribly insightful HBO show — The Wire. It was EXACTLY like what I saw in law enforcement in Savannah, but in the 3rd season, it did this thing on legalizing all drugs…..
…..and it made what I had already thought was a bad hole in the program intolerable.
A large percentage of destructive crime in the US is driven by drug use.
To cut this discussion short, how many of you would let a crack addict stay in your house after the wife or husband had kicked them out? even if he or she was your brother or sister?
Meth use (and production and selling) is becoming a major problem in Georgia.
And how many pot dealers do you think spend a career of only selling pot?
The drug culture in the US is one of the biggest things I bash American society about……
So, I can see stressing treatement as an option rather than incarceration….
….but probably not when the trouble with the law came because the addict was busting out my car window to steal my stereo to sell to get his next pipe dream….
What this does not tell you is 80% of our gusts at the graybar hotel are blacks.
railwaycharm wrote:
What this does not tell you is 80% of our gusts at the graybar hotel are blacks.
Nice try. You’re only off by about 33%.
Okay, these stats are from 1997, and maybe the Bush administration has been conducting a wholesale freeing of White criminals and replacing them with Black criminals. But if that were the case, I’m sure the liberal media would have told us.
It’ll be up to 80% soon now that Johnnie Cochran is dead.
Thorin, you’re probably right. Black people can generally count on stiffer sentences than whites in America for identical crimes, Johnnie, hero that he was, made some equalities happen in his lifetime.
One of the things that gets me about the “US prisons have more blacks than whites (and is thus a clear sign of racisim)” is —-
——what do you think happens in a city like Atlanta, Savannah, Baltimore, DC?
Majority black juries are somehow forced by the White Man to convict blacks against their will?
In a city like Atlanta, the mayor, police chief, city council —- the power positions —- are held by blacks, because blacks make up a large percentage of the voting population.
These are the people who enforce the laws.
The juries are also made up of a lot of blacks, because a lot make up the local community.
Or, is it the case that the blacks in jail are almost wholly from outside the cities and areas where the population is mostly black and thus the government leadership is mostly black?
How exactly does all this work in this argument?
And you want to criticize the other lamebrain people who look at the number of blacks in prison and say it is clearly a genetic/racial sign……….
usinkorea:
One of the things that gets me about the “US prisons have more blacks than whites (and is thus a clear sign of racisim)” is —-
Um… for the record, I was not saying anything at all about the size of the Black prison population being racist. Don’t know if your comment was directed at me or not.
I was only pointing out that Blacks make up nowhere near 80% of the US prison population.
By the way, non-Hispanic Whites are still, according to my link, incarcerated at a rate of 0.3%, making American Whites nearly twice as likely to be incarcerated as people in England/Wales or China or Brazil, 50% more likely than people in Mexico, ten times more likely than people in India, and five times more likely than people in Japan.
The Marmot:
Perhaps even more odd is that Japan–Japan!–actually locks up a full 0.60 percent of its population.
Check again, Marmot. The good folks at the Foreign Policy blog said they were missing a zero: instead of .60, it’s .060. I thought the .60 seemed rather high and uncharacteristic of Japanese society.
Kushibo,
You didn’t bring up the racial make up of the prisons….
And as has been my habit this month, I had in mind the kind of conversation I’ve generally heard on the topic in the past………
Maybe they should institute affirmative action in the prisons. Make sure that the make-up of prisoners exactly mirrors the general population. And if there’s a shortage of any particular race, elevate the sentences of underrepresented races, perhaps those with unpaid parking tickets, to replace the overrepresented number of murderers of another race.