John Clegg - Punishment - in - Modern - Societies - The - Prevalence of Incarceration - Cárcel

CR07CH06_Usmani ARjats.
cls July 27, 2023 12:48
Annual Review of Criminology

Punishment in Modern
Societies: The Prevalence
and Causes of Incarceration
Around the World
Access provided by University of Sydney on 08/23/23. For personal use only.
Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2024.7. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
John Clegg,1 Sebastian Spitz,2 Adaner Usmani,2

and Annalena Wolcke3
1
Department of Political Economy, University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
2
Department of Sociology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA;
email: ausmani@fas.harvard.edu
3
Independent Researcher, Cambridge, United Kingdom
Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2024. 7:6.1–6.21 Keywords

The Annual Review of Criminology is online at
comparative criminology, comparative criminal justice systems,
criminol.annualreviews.org
incarceration, prison conditions, capital punishment, punitiveness
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-criminol-022422-
020311 Abstract
Copyright © 2024 by the Author(s).
The literature on the prevalence and causes of punishment has been domi-
All rights reserved
nated by research into the United States. Yet most of the world’s prisoners
live elsewhere, and the United States is no longer the country with the
world’s highest incarceration rate. This article considers what we know about
the prevalence and causes of incarceration around the world. We focus on
three features of incarceration: level, inequality, and severity. Existing com-
parative research offers many insights, but we identify methodological and
theoretical shortcomings. Quantitative scholars are still content to draw
causal inferences from correlations, partly because (like qualitative schol-
ars) they are often limited to studying the present and the developed world.
More data will allow better inferences. We close by defending the goal of
building precise and generalizable theories of punishment.
·.•�-
6.1
, Review in Advance first posted on

August 8, 2023. (Changes may
still occur before final publication.)
CR07CH06_Usmani ARjats.cls July 27, 2023 12:48
INTRODUCTION
A common refrain among activists, the media, and many scholars is that the United States has
the highest incarceration rate in the world. As of 2023, the claim is no longer true. Contemporary
data suggest that other countries (El Salvador, Rwanda, Turkmenistan, and Cuba) have all recently
recorded higher incarceration rates than the United States recorded this year. It is Cuba, not the
United States, that can today claim to be the world’s prison capital, at least by our best estimates.
In this regard, the era of American exceptionalism has come to an end.
The decrowning of the United States is partly a function of declining prison populations here
(Phelps & Pager 2016). It is also, however, the result of rapid increases in some of the world’s
leading jailers; both El Salvador and Turkmenistan have more than doubled their incarceration
rates since 2006.
Ideally, these facts would be well known to scholars of incarceration, but we suspect that most
US-based scholars have not paid much attention to these global trends, especially those in the
Global South. This is lamentable. Although it is understandable that US mass incarceration has
consumed so much scholarly energy, explanations for the outlying rates of incarceration in the
United States would be greatly improved by cross-national and historical comparison. It is difficult
to identify what makes the United States distinctive by studying only the United States (Clegg
et al. 2023). Furthermore, as we argue in this review, it is important that scholars of punishment
reclaim some of the grander ambitions that animated the canonical social theorists of punishment.
We should have something useful to say about why El Salvador has the highest incarceration rate
in the world and why Japan and Burkina Faso have two of the world’s lowest.
The purpose of this review is to canvas data and existing scholarship to sketch the state of
our knowledge about the prevalence and causes of incarceration around the world. We draw on
our own multiyear effort to collect comparative and historical data on criminal justice systems,
relying on a mix of primary sources, secondary sources, and existing cross-national collections.1
We supplement this with a review of the existing literature. The first section, titled Prevalence,
reviews what we know about the prevalence of punishment across place and time, focusing on
three dimensions of incarceration: the level (or overall rate), its distribution (or inequality), and its
severity (e.g., prison conditions). The second section, titled Causes, comments on what we know
about why the nature, inequality, and especially level of punishment vary across place and time.
Our judgment is that knowledge on this subject is still in its infancy, which is partly a conse-
quence of the fact that data on punishment in the past and in the Global South have been scarce.
Yet our own experience has been that it is easier than many have assumed to collect these data.
And although comparative analysis is fraught, it is not impossible. This licenses an optimistic con-
clusion: There is a lot that we stand to learn, relatively quickly, if scholars can be convinced to
study these questions in a comparative and historical light.
PREVALENCE
Good explanations are built on good descriptions. Yet one of the challenges for existing scholarship
on punishment is our limited knowledge of how the incarceration rate has varied across place and
time. Fifty years ago, Blumstein & Cohen (1973) theorized that incarceration rates tend to be
stable over time. It is now commonplace in the literature to bemusingly note how wrong they
1 Unless otherwise noted, data come from the History of Punishment data collection, which is a multiyear
effort involving more than 85 researchers to collect comparative and historical data on penal systems and
penal outcomes. Data come from more than 2,000 primary and secondary sources. Our hope is to make the
data public within the next few years. For more information, see bit.ly/histpun_sourceslist or please contact
·.•�-
Adaner Usmani.
6.2 Clegg et al.

were, in light of the United States’ punitive turn. But the truth is that no one knows for sure
whether Blumstein & Cohen’s prediction holds elsewhere (and within what bounds). Perhaps the
United States is exceptional in having had a major shift in its incarceration rate, and punishment
elsewhere is generally stable. Alternatively, it is possible that major fluctuations are more rule
than exception. To build any kind of theory of the incarceration rate, we have to answer these and
related questions.
We shall focus on three salient descriptive features of incarceration. First, we describe the over-
all level of incarceration, defined as the share of the population that is confined against their will
in prison or jail at any given time. But we could equally ask about the share admitted to prison
or jail over the course of a given year (i.e., the flow rather than the stock of incarceration) or the
share of the population that has ever experienced incarceration. Second, we consider the distribu-
tion of incarceration across social groups. It seems clear (as we detail below) that the experience
of incarceration is unequal everywhere. That is, the poor, the racially disenfranchised, and men
are everywhere more likely to be incarcerated than the rich, the racially privileged, and women.
But not all places and times are equally unequal. Third, we survey the severity of incarceration,
as measured by prison conditions (sometimes called the depth of imprisonment) (Crewe 2021,
Downes 1988) and length of sentences. Being incarcerated in the United States is not the same as
being incarcerated in Sweden, nor is it the same as being incarcerated in Turkmenistan. The level
of incarceration in Sweden might thus have a different meaning (normatively and scientifically)
than Turkmenistan’s level of incarceration.
In this section, we review what we know about the level, inequality, and severity of incarceration
across the world. The level is the easiest dimension to measure and thus is where we spend the
most time. But this does not mean that it is also the most important of these dimensions. Further
descriptive work on the inequality in and severity of confinement is urgent.
Level
We have collected data on the number of prisoners in 154 different jurisdictions (mostly sovereign
countries but sometimes also colonies or dependencies) over more than three centuries. Data
before the nineteenth century are still relatively sparse. But we have managed to find prison data
for more than a dozen countries by the middle of the nineteenth century. By 1900, we have data
from around 30 countries. By 1950, we have data from almost 40. Between 1970 and 2000, we
have data on more than 100 countries. And after 2000, we have data for around 150 countries.
Unsurprisingly, our historical data consist disproportionately of more developed countries with
relatively high levels of state capacity. But we have managed to collect consistent, continuous data
for several comparatively poor countries.2
The median incarceration rate in our sample is 97 per 100,000 people (or around 0.1% of the
population). Most countries incarcerate somewhere between 0.05% and 0.2% of their population
(the 20th and 80th percentile values), but, as Figure 1 shows, the distribution is right-tailed. The
highest rate ever observed was in Rwanda in the 1996–2000 period (almost 2% of the population),
whereas the highest sustained rates seem to have been in the Soviet Union in the 1940s and 1950s
(around 1% of the population). The incarceration rate at the peak level of incarceration in the
United States (2006–2010) is, at present, the tenth highest five-year rate of incarceration in our
data set (a rate of about 750 per 100,000; approximately 0.75%).
2 Dataavailability is also a political matter. Some countries (e.g., Saudi Arabia) choose not to report prisoner
numbers, whereas others (e.g., Cuba, China) report numbers that are widely believed by scholars to undercount
·.•�-
incarcerated populations.
www.annualreviews.org • Punishment in Modern Societies 6.3

0.006
0.004
Density
0.002
0.000
0 500 1,000 1,500
Prisoners per 100,000

Figure 1
The distribution of the incarceration rate. This figure summarizes the distribution of the five-year
incarceration rate (prisoners per 100,000) across all countries and years for which we have data. The dashed
line plots the median incarceration rate (97) across all observations. The mean is 134. We have collected
13,811 distinct estimates of the stock of prisoners in any given year across 154 countries, from which these
five-year estimates derive. Data are from the years 1690 to 2022 and derive from the forthcoming History of
Punishment data set (https://gist.github.com/ausmani23/76acff17387cbbc15559cc02bc11b991).
In one sense, these data could be said to support something like the judgment that the incar-
ceration rate is relatively stable. The rate of incarceration has consistently fluctuated below an
upper bound. There has never been a country that has put 10% or 50% of its population inside
prison. It is not difficult to imagine why something like this is infeasible, if it were even conceiv-
able. Yet below this upper limit, the incarceration rate has varied considerably, in both senses. It
has varied within places across time. And it has varied across places at any given point in time. Our
data suggest marginally more variation across place than time (i.e., the average within-country
standard deviation across years is lower than the average within-time standard deviation across
countries, even when limiting to countries for which we have a considerable amount of data). But
there is enough variation within places to reject Blumstein & Cohen’s (1973) view that we should
be thinking of a country’s rate of punishment as a stable outcome.
These data suggest many lines of inquiry, most of which we cannot explore here. But we can
answer two preliminary questions. How does the incarceration rate vary across place? And how
does it vary across time?
Figure 2 shows the distribution of rates of incarceration across the world in the present day,
grouped by world region. Three things stand out. First, the distribution of incarceration is right-
tailed within each region. Each region seems to have one or two mass incarcerators, which is a
curious empirical fact. Second, the median incarceration rate differs significantly by region. The
highest rate is in Latin America and the Caribbean, where the median incarceration rate today is
around 250 per 100,000; the lowest is in Western Europe and the Neo-European settler colonies
(United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), where the median incarceration rate today
is around 94 per 100,000. Third, and curiously, there seems to be no clear pattern by level of
economic development. The median incarceration rate in Africa and the Middle East is identical
(after rounding) to the median incarceration rate in Western Europe (94).
Someone who knew only Figure 1 might start crafting theories to explain why some of the
·.•�-
richest and the poorest countries in the world have similar rates of incarceration. But one of the
6.4 Clegg et al.

Cuba
800
United States
El Salvador
600
Thailand
Rwanda Turkmenistan
Russia
400
Swaziland
Belarus
New Zealand
200
0
Western Europe/ Sub-Saharan Asia/Paciﬁc Eastern Latin America/

Neo-Europe Africa/MENA Europe Caribbean
Figure 2
Rates of incarceration, 2015–present. This figure plots the distribution of rates of incarceration around the
world, post-2015, grouped by region. In cases where we have multiple estimates for a given country (either
across sources or years), we report the median of those estimates. Prisoner data come mostly from the
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the World Prison Brief. Population data come
mostly from the Maddison Project. Note that the recent estimate from Cuba is from a Madrid-based human
rights NGO and should be interpreted with caution. Prisoner counts for China include data from formal
prisons, as reported to the UNODC, but do not include people in internment camps in Xinjiang or
elsewhere in China. Abbreviation: MENA, Middle East and Northern Africa.
points we would like to emphasize is that to delimit plausible theories, our descriptions must
be richer. One must establish the phenomenon before one can explain it (Merton 1987). The
incarceration rate, after all, is a dense statistic. It is the product of a chain of decisions that lead
to incarceration. A simple way to capture this is to decompose the incarceration rate into two
quantities: the homicide rate and the rate of incarceration per homicide.3 The first (as we argue
again below) is our best estimate of the level of serious crime across place and time. The second
may thus be viewed as something like the rate at which a given society turns serious crime into a
stock of prisoners.
This decomposition illuminates some things that Figure 2 obscured. The fact that the median
incarceration rate in the West is the same as the median incarceration rate in Africa and the Middle
East obscures the fact that the two regions produce this rate in dramatically different ways. The
rate of homicide in Africa and the Middle East is generally much higher, but the rate of prisoners
per homicide is much lower. Put another way, penal systems in these two regions are not at all
identical. No theory should treat them as instances of the same outcome. Indeed, our data suggest
that economic development tends to move countries from the bottom-right of Figure 3 (high
homicide, low imprisonment per homicide) to the top-left (low homicide, high imprisonment per
homicide).
Figure 4 shows trends over time in the developed and developing worlds. The graph suggests
three eras in the history of incarceration among developed countries. First, it shows a rise in prison
use as a penal sanction. Incarceration rates rose steadily across these countries until the mid-to-
late nineteenth century. Second, it shows a decline in its use in developed countries until about
·.•�-
3 Prisoners per people = homicides per people × prisoners per homicide

125
Western Europe/Neo-Europe
Asia/Paciﬁc
100
Prisoners per homicide

Eastern Europe
75
50
25 Sub-Saharan Africa/MENA Latin America/Caribbean
0 5 10 15
Homicides per 100,000
Figure 3
A decomposition of regional incarceration rates, 2015–present. This figure decomposes regional
incarceration rates into two quantities that together constitute it: the homicide rate and the rate of prisoners
per homicide. The first estimates the rate of serious crime; the second estimates the rate at which a society
turns serious crime into a stock of prisoners. Data from the forthcoming History of Punishment data set
(https://gist.github.com/ausmani23/76acff17387cbbc15559cc02bc11b991). Abbreviation: MENA,
Middle East and Northern Africa.
1955. Note that the prisoners per homicide ratio was not falling over this period, and the ratio
of police per prisoners was rising, so this era is probably better described as an era of declining
(peacetime, civilian) violence and substitution away from prisons toward noncustodial measures
and a greater reliance on policing rather than an era of less punitiveness writ large. Finally, the
graph shows a more recent rise in the rate of incarceration after 1955. Note that this rise is not
driven by trends in the United States. Except for Denmark, Finland, Italy, and Switzerland, all
other developed countries on which this graph is based saw an increase in their incarceration rates
after WWII.
Curiously, trends in the developing world seem (at least at first glance) to mirror trends in
the developed world. At least in the group of seven developing countries we plot in Figure 4, we
see something like the first two of the three phases described above, offset by about 120 years.
In these countries, the incarceration rate rose until around 1980 and then began to decline. But
we emphasize that this pattern is much less clear: Of the 7 countries for which we have data,
four (Ghana, India, Kenya, and Nigeria) see declines or stable incarceration rates over this period
and three (Brazil, South Africa, Turkey) see (substantial) increases. This divergence may have
something to do with the fact that the countries in latter group are middle income rather than
poor. Answers to this and other puzzles await better data.
Inequality
It is well-established that prisons around the world “hold a disproportionately large number of
·.•�-
people from disadvantaged and ethnic, racial, and other minority communities” (Skarbek 2020,
6.6 Clegg et al.

120
90
The developed world
60
The developing world
30
1800 1900 2000

Year
Figure 4
The incarceration rate over time. This figure plots a smooth line through the median incarceration rates of countries for which we have
data spanning 100 years, with no gaps larger than 25 years. We group these countries into two buckets: the developed world (Australia,
Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, England and Wales, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand,
Norway, Scotland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United States), and the developing world (Brazil, Ghana, India, Kenya, Nigeria, South
Africa, Turkey). The dashed lines illustrate local minima or maxima. Data from the forthcoming History of Punishment data set
(https://gist.github.com/ausmani23/76acff17387cbbc15559cc02bc11b991).
p. 149). This inequality is itself an important theoretical explanandum. Why is exposure to prison
patterned so unequally by race, class, citizenship status, gender, and age? What our data collection
suggests, however, is that there is also important variation in these inequalities.
Gender-based differences are the easiest to document because, unlike other dimensions, they
can be evaluated without collecting extensive data on the denominator4 and have relatively stable
categories across place and time. Our data confirm that prisoners across place and time are over-
whelmingly male (the median male share is approximately 95%). But there is important variation
around this fact. In Israel today, about 1% of prisoners are female; in Hong Kong, this number is
20%.5
Inequality in other dimensions is harder (but not impossible) to document because it requires
data on both prison and population groups, which typically come from different sources and
whose definitions and boundedness differ. Racial inequality in incarceration seems to be ubiq-
uitous across the world. Black people and other ethnoracial minorities are disproportionately
4 That is, on the assumption that most jurisdictions are roughly 50:50, although the best analyses use population
data broken down by gender.

5 Hong Kong’s large female prison share is largely due to the incarceration of many female sex workers from
·.•�-
mainland China (Lo 2017).

incarcerated in, for example, the United States (Wacquant 2010), South Africa (Dep. Correct. Serv.
2008), Canada (Owusu-Bempah et al. 2021), and the United Kingdom (Lammy 2017). Indigenous
communities are over-represented in the prison systems of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand
(Cunneen & Tauri 2019). And although many countries do not systematically collect ethnoracial
data on incarcerated people, we know that Roma people and foreign nationals are disproportion-
ately incarcerated across Europe (Marier & Cochran 2023). Even in Norwegian prisons—often
celebrated as a model—foreign nationals are overrepresented (Ugelvik 2017).
Although we still have much to learn about how racial inequality varies across place, and how to
best study that inequality, the data we have collected suggest that the racial inequalities that char-
acterize American mass incarceration are not exceptional. In our data set, the 5:1 Black:White
ratio in the United States seems to lie somewhere in the middle of the distribution of racial in-
equalities around the world. In New Zealand, for instance, Māori people are incarcerated at more
than 8 times the rate of Whites. Anderson (2022) finds something similar in a survey of racial
inequalities across 18 contemporary democracies.
Whatever their explanation, racial inequalities of this magnitude have an important implication
for scholars of mass incarceration. It has been common to estimate mass incarceration by the
aggregate incarceration rate, but Garland’s (2001) original formulation of the term was intended
to capture societies where, for some significant social group, the experience of incarceration had
become a regular part of the life-course. The incarceration rate for Aboriginal adults in Australia
is now approximately 2,500 per 100,000, surpassing the rate of African-American adults (Leigh
2020). We have also found incredibly high rates of indigenous incarceration in Western Australia,
historically. In 1971, nearly 14% of Aboriginal men (and 5% of Aboriginal women) were admitted
to prison over the course of one year, suggesting a form of mass incarceration there.6
Severity
Prison is everywhere an awful and undesirable place. Although some features of what make
prison awful are probably intrinsic to the prison (e.g., the lack of liberty and autonomy), prison
conditions vary substantially around the world. Research on this subject is not straightforward
because most data about life in prison derive from prison authorities (or surveys permitted by
them) (Peirce & Fondevila 2020).7 But it is possible to measure some features of life in prison
using comparative data.
Figure 5 illustrates the variation in ways that are relatively easy to measure. As it shows, prisons
are mostly overcrowded (the median prison system is overcapacity), but some are much more
overcrowded than others. Chad reports having four times more prisoners than it is capable of
incarcerating, whereas Japan is 40% below capacity. The median prison system reports an all-cause
annual mortality rate of approximately 3 deaths for every 1,000 people in prison, but, according to
data reported by prison authorities, prisoners in Kyrgyzstan die at 12 times the rate of prisoners
in South Korea.
6 We have also been collecting data on incarceration by class (or proxies like education, literacy, or occupation).
It is common to read that “the least educated, most unemployed, and poorest groups of society” are held in
prisons (Karstedt 2021b, p. 22; see also Wacquant 2001, Reiman & Leighton 2020). But very little is known
about how these inequalities vary across countries. We know that class inequality increased dramatically in the
United States over recent decades (Clegg & Usmani 2019, Muller & Roehrkasse 2022). But whether this kind
of variation is common within other countries is a subject for future research.
7 Qualitative data are also bedeviled by sampling and reporting biases and the challenges of rendering them
comparable to each other. Skarbek (2020) draws on qualitative data and finds that prison conditions vary
substantially around the world. Karstedt (2021b) has used US State Department human rights reports to
·.•�-
grade prison systems on a scale.
6.8 Clegg et al.

Conditions Length
100 200 300 400

Prisoners per prisoner capacity
200 400 600

Deaths per 100k prisoners
0 10 20 30
Prisoners per guards
0 500 1,000 1,500 2,000

Prisoners per prison
0 2 4 6
Prisoners per admission
Figure 5
The severity of prison around the world. This figure illustrates the severity of prisons around the world,
measured in two dimensions (conditions and length). Most data are from the United Nations Office on
Drugs and Crime. We drop extreme outliers (values greater or less than four standard deviations above the
mean) to make the distributions interpretable. The vertical solid line is the median value. The diamond-
shaped point is the United States, included as reference. The solid dots are countries that are not extreme
outliers but that lie more than one-and-a-half times the interquartile range beyond either the 25th or 75th
percentiles. Data from the forthcoming History of Punishment data set (https://gist.github.com/
ausmani23/76acff17387cbbc15559cc02bc11b991).
Although it is rarely possible to measure brutality and violence inside the prison directly, we
can graph two proxies: the ratio of prisoners to guards and the number of prisoners at any given
prison facility. Stuntz (2009) thought that the former would predict brutality (lower ratios, less vi-
olence), whereas Skarbek (2020) argues that the latter is a proximate explanation for the awfulness
of life inside (smaller prisons, better conditions). The median prison system has approximately
3 prisoners per guard, but the Netherlands and Norway both have 1 guard for every prisoner, and
the Philippines and Burundi have about 29 and 36 prisoners per guard, respectively. And although
the median prison facility has about 430 prisoners, Switzerland has only about 60 per facility while
Nicaragua has more than 2,000.
Of course, the severity of a prison sentence is not just a function of how awful it is to spend
·.•�-
any given year in prison but also a function of how long the average sentence lasts. It is not simple

to estimate sentence length across place and time, but one proxy for the average time spent in
prison is the ratio of the stock of prisoners to the flow (e.g., prisoners/admissions).8 In the median
prison system, this ratio is around 1 (i.e., about one person is admitted for every one person held
at a given point in the year). But in Switzerland, the flow is six times the stock, whereas in Peru
the stock is six times the flow. Notably, we estimate that the United States is far above the world
median (2.5 prisoners per admission).9
CAUSES
There is a rich literature that has tried to explain patterns like these, from country-specific and
comparative monographs to large-N quantitative studies. Yet our judgment is that we still have an
enormous amount to learn. Existing scholarship has important methodological flaws (especially
the quantitative work, which either predates or ignores the lessons of the credibility revolution).10
We review this literature before reprising this concern below.
Level
As we saw above, the incarceration rate can be decomposed into the product of crime and the
likelihood that a person who commits a crime ends up in prison for an extended period of time.
Immediately, this suggests two kinds of explanations for the incarceration rate: those that explain
the crime rate and those that explain why incarceration is the response to a given level of crime,
or what we call the rate of punishment:
prisoners/people = crime/people × prisoners/crime 1.
The rate of crime. The extent to which this first channel matters is hotly debated in the current
literature. Among quantitative studies, research consistently finds an association between homi-
cide and incarceration rates (e.g., Clark & Herbolsheimer 2021, D’Amico & Williamson 2019,
Jones et al. 2017, Marier & Cochran 2023, Neapolitan 2001, Ruddell & Urbina 2004, Weiss et al.
2020). But there are important caveats. First, when low-income countries are modeled separately,
there is often a null result (M. Ouimet, unpublished results; Ruddell 2005). Second, this effect is
consistently found for cross-sectional studies only, whereas longitudinal studies reach inconsistent
results (DeMichele 2014; Jacobs & Kleban 2003; Sozzo 2022; Sutton 2004, 2012, 2013). Third,
studies that use the total number of crimes reported to the police, rather than homicides, reach
inconsistent results (Aebi & Kuhn 2000, Neapolitan 2001, Sung 2006).
8 Because the meaning of an admission to prison is not stable across jurisdictions, we calculate this ratio within
the sentenced population only.
9 Note that one difficulty of estimating this ratio in the United States is that our measure of the denominator
excludes the sentenced population admitted to jails, but the numerator includes it. Thus, this is an overestimate.
10 The credibility revolution refers to the increasing use of econometric techniques that seek to identify the
causal effect of X on Y rather than simply their (partial) correlation. It is still common to see work in this
field draw causal inferences from techniques that, by contemporary standards, license no such thing. As is now
well understood, it is not possible to simply control away other causes of an outcome by sticking them on the
right-hand side of a regression (e.g., Angrist & Pischke 2009, Morgan & Winship 2014). This is because of
familiar problems like the fact that Y might also have caused X or because there may be some unobserved
Z that causes both X and Y. It is also because highly correlated causes are often entangled with each other,
which makes it even more difficult to identify theoretically relevant estimands like the total effect of X on Y.
To give just one example: When estimating the effect of democracy on incarceration, it is typical to control
for development (which plausibly causes both democracy and incarceration). But democracy probably affects
development (which affects incarceration), which means that controlling for development biases estimates of
·.•�-
the total effect of democracy on incarceration.
6.10 Clegg et al.

The judgment of the qualitative literature tends to be more skeptical. In a series of well-known
reviews of this literature, Tonry concluded that the reason for harsher penal policies in Western
countries in the second half of the twentieth century has not been rising crime rates but “distinc-
tive cultural, historical, constitutional and political conditions” (Tonry 2007, p. 1). Tonry notes
that crime rates followed a similar shape in all Western countries after World War II, whereas
trajectories of incarceration diverged, suggesting that crime and punishment were delinked. This
view is supported by much of the literature on American exceptionalism, which has been skeptical
of the idea that crime (rather than reaction to crime) can explain the punitive turn of the 1970s
and 1980s (Alexander 2012, Beckett 1997, Hinton 2016, Murakawa 2014, but see Forman 2017,
Fortner 2015, Garland 2019).
One of the principal difficulties in evaluating this verdict, however, is that scholars have not
given much thought to how to conceptualize the crime rate across time and place, and they have
yet to resolve the difficulty of how to reliably measure whatever the concept ought to represent.
Typically, the crime rate means something like the frequency of violations of the law that meet
a minimum threshold of seriousness. Scholars studying a single country will often choose to use
aggregate measures of these crimes reported by or to the police as our best measure of this crime
rate.
Neither decision is satisfying. First, because more serious crimes are much rarer than less se-
rious crimes, any aggregate measure of the crime rate conceived in this way will be dominated by
the least serious crimes. Yet more serious crimes have much more serious tariffs, which means that
they should have a stronger relationship to the incarceration rate than less serious crimes. Unless
more serious and less serious crimes are substantially correlated across time and place, we should
not expect a strong relationship between the crime rate (conceptualized as the total number of
violations of the law) and the incarceration rate. Second, no one has proposed a satisfying solution
to measuring crime across time and place. Victim surveys exist, but they comprise small samples
and almost certainly miss hard-to-reach populations (suggesting they may underestimate serious
crime). They are anyway not available for most countries over most of modern history. And if we
rely on reported crime to estimate whatever we think a crime rate should record, we must contend
with both police bias and the fact that the majority of crime probably goes unreported.11
Without answers to these conceptual and measurement challenges, it is difficult to decide what
to make of existing findings about the relation between crime and incarceration. A simple illus-
tration is Figure 6: If we use the homicide rate to estimate the serious crime rate in the United
States, the United States appears, strikingly, no more punitive than most countries in the devel-
oped world. This immediately casts doubt (at least at first glance) on the conventional judgment
that the United States reacts to normal levels of crime with exceptional levels of punishment. Yet
if we use the police-recorded aggregate crime rate to estimate the crime rate in the United States
(which suggests that the United States has about as much crime as other developed countries), a
more conventional picture emerges: The United States is exceptionally punitive. Our own analy-
sis, as well as the comparative work of Gallo et al. (2017), suggests that the former is closer to the
truth than the latter. Yet there is clearly more work to be done here.
Of course, if crime does matter, as we suspect it must, explanations of the incarceration rate
will have to say something about what explains variation in crime across time and place. This is its
own literature, which we cannot review here. But the cross-national literature on punishment does
11 For long-duration comparisons of many countries, there is thus no alternative to estimating crime by the
homicide rate. This is why cross-national quantitative scholars typically use the homicide rate to measure
crime. But we need a better answer to the question of whether this is a decent measure of a concept we care
·.•�-
about.

United States
50 100 150 200

Prisoners per homicide
Spain United States
0.1 0.2 0.3

Prisoners per crime
Figure 6
A tale of two denominators. This figure shows the distribution of prisoners per crime and prisoners per
homicide in the developed world, where crime is the number of homicides, assaults, robberies, rapes, and
thefts reported to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Data are medians between 2015 and the
present. Data from the forthcoming History of Punishment data set (https://gist.github.com/ausmani23/
76acff17387cbbc15559cc02bc11b991).
yield some insights. As a theoretical matter, much of the economic and some of the institutional
explanations are mediated, at least partly, by the crime rate. The causal relevance of higher levels
of income (Clark & Herbolsheimer 2021), income inequality (Karstedt 2021a), unemployment
(Rusche & Kirchheimer 1939), labor unions (DeMichele 2014; Sutton 2012, 2013), institutional
anomie (Weiss et al. 2020), inflation (Sutton 2004), mental asylums (Penrose 1939),12 and the
welfare state (Cavadino & Dignan 2006, Downes & Hansen 2006, but see de Koster et al. 2008)
may all run through this mechanism, partly or entirely.
The rate of punishment. Whether or not crime matters, it is certainly not the only thing that
matters. To explain the incarceration rate, we need to know why some places react to a given level
of crime with prison more frequently than other places do. Here, too, explanations can be sorted
into two kinds.
The penal balance. First, one possible explanation is that some societies lean on other penal sanc-
tions to manage crime. This observation has dominated the literature on the birth of the prison.
Many of our most canonical works on punishment explain the prison as a substitute for other pe-
nal sanctions like whipping, torture, and the gallows (Durkheim 1900, Foucault 1995, Spierenburg
2008; see generally Garland 1993, chapters 2–3, 10). But it is a question that can equally be asked
across different societies today. Within the developed world, countries vary widely in the extent
to which they rely on prisons to respond to crime. Other countries are much more likely to use
fines than the United States (Garland 2019), and, relatedly, they distribute their penal resources
very differently between policing and incarceration (Lewis & Usmani 2022).
A small body of empirical work has begun to think about penal systems in this way. Mendlein
(2021) found no association between the size of a country’s police force and its prison population,
12 The Penrose hypothesis argues that mental asylums and prisons are inversely correlated. This has inspired
a literature in psychology and related fields (for a review, see Kalapos 2016), which has developed separately
·.•�-
from the cross-national literature on incarceration.
6.12 Clegg et al.

even though the number of prosecutors and prisoners was positively correlated, whereas
Neapolitan (2001) found no association between a crude measure of police violence and in-
carceration. In the contemporary period, countries with common-law legal origins have higher
incarceration rates; this is hypothesized to be the result of their smaller bureaucracies capable of
enforcing fines, probation, and other non-prison punishments (D’Amico & Williamson 2015; see
also DeMichele 2013). These findings call into question the notion of a bundled penal state with
covarying components, allowing for the possibility of a trade-off between policing and incarcer-
ation as distinct methods of controlling crime. By contrast, cross-sectionally, countries using the
death penalty have greater incarceration rates (D’Amico & Williamson 2015, 2019; Jones et al.
2017). This suggests that the death penalty and high incarceration rates may be part of the same
general phenomenon: high penal severity.
Of course, these are proximate but not themselves deep explanations of the incarceration rate.
The next question is why some places rely relatively more on prison than on other penal sanctions.
One answer is economic. Rusche & Kirchheimer (1939) argue that prisons were first introduced
because labor was becoming more scarce, making prison labor a potential source of profit, whereas
maiming, execution, and banishment threatened to reduce a nation’s valuable labor supply. In a
more restricted sense, one could argue that it is only modern states with robust infrastructural
capacities that can afford to clothe, feed, and house 0.05% to 0.2% of their population. The his-
torical significance of this is clear: 500 or 1,000 years ago, elites did not have the revenue capacity
to maintain prison systems (Mann 1993).
Whether this remains true today in the developing world is unclear, given the high levels of
incarceration in some poor countries. Clark & Herbolsheimer (2021) argue that the poorest na-
tions have low incarceration rates and that up to a certain level of development, incarceration and
GDP/capita are positively correlated. Beyond that level, however, the relationship becomes neg-
ative, leading the authors to label their findings a “criminological Kuznets curve.”13 We return to
their argument below.
Another answer is cultural: Drawing on Elias (2000), who argued that a civilizing process stig-
matized the use of violence, Garland (1993) and Spierenburg (2008) argued that states responded
by shifting the weight of sanctions from more violent forms of punishment like torture or exe-
cution to less (at least overtly) violent forms, like prisons and fines. Finally, there are institutional
or political explanations. Durkheim (1900) argued that democracies would punish less harshly
than dictatorships, where those who bear the burden of harsh penalties have access to fewer po-
litical remedies. As Lacey et al. (2018) argue, one explanation for why the United States might
prefer harsher, longer punishments (like prison) to milder, shorter sanctions like fines is that lib-
eral market economies are more willing to abandon individuals to their fate. Coordinated market
economies, by contrast, emphasize an ideal of rehabilitating offenders, rather than excluding them.
There is some support for all these hypotheses in the existing literature, although existing tests
are exceedingly imprecise. Cross-sectional tests of the Rusche–Kirchheimer hypothesis that un-
employment causes incarceration have been mixed on whether there even is such a relationship
[D’Amico & Williamson (2015) and Killias (1986) find an association, whereas Marier & Cochran
(2023), Neapolitan (2001), and Ruddell (2005) do not].14 The literature on democracy and in-
carceration shows a consistent negative relationship, providing tentative support for Durkheim
13 The Kuznets Curve refers to the association between economic development and income inequality pos-
tulated by the economist Simon Kuznet, in which inequality at first rises with development before falling
(Kuznets 1955).
14 This literature sometimes suggests that moral panic or economic threat links unemployment to punitiveness,
·.•�-
which is why we discuss this here. That said, Rusche (1933) himself pointed to crime as a mechanism.

(Clark & Herbolsheimer 2021; Ruddell & Urbina 2004, 2007). But this relationship may be con-
tingent on the level of economic development; Davis & Gibson-Light (2020) find that the negative
association between democracy and incarceration was only present among wealthy countries. We
return to this particular inference below.
The use of the prison. Second, holding crime and the use of other penal sanctions constant, some
places may simply be more likely to send offenders to prison and for a longer time.15 Note that the
first challenge is simply to establish whether any given place is more likely to imprison someone,
conditional on arrest or conviction, and more likely to sentence them to a longer term. There has
been some comparative work on this among wealthy countries in the present (Tonry & Farrington
2005), but it should be possible to collect data on arrests, convictions, admissions, and the number
of incarcerated people to estimate these ratios more reliably across time and place. This has been
a focus of our own data collection.
To the extent that variation in incarceration rates is explained by variation in either the
probability of admission to prison or the length of a prison sentence, there are several deeper
explanations available. Much of these have been trained on the case of American exceptionalism,
assuming that this is the channel by which American penality has distinguished itself. Cultural ex-
planations refer to a paranoid style in American politics, borne of fundamentalist religion (Tonry
2009), or an early leveling republicanism leading to harsh treatment for all (Whitman 2005). In-
stitutional explanations cite America’s conflictual (rather than consensual) political system (Lacey
2012, Tonry 2007) or its system of elected rather than professionally appointed judges (Barkow
2009, Savelsberg 1994). Finally, and perhaps most prominently, the conventional political explana-
tion for American punitiveness cites its history of racial oppression (e.g., Alexander 2012, Hinton
2016, Muhammad 2011).
All these explanations have general implications that we have yet to adequately test. Cultural
explanations might be especially challenging to operationalize (how to measure a punitive cul-
ture except by its outcomes?), but other explanations have been examined. For instance, Sutton
(2000, 2004, 2012) finds that left-parties in power lead to less incarceration over time, although
this effect is contingent on the period (Sutton 2013). The literature on race and incarceration has
focused on minority threat (Jacobs & Kleban 2003; Ruddell 2005; Ruddell & Urbina 2004, 2007).
The latest cross-national research suggests a curvilinear relationship between ethnic diversity and
incarceration (Marier & Cochran 2023). Davis & Gibson-Light (2020) identify a different racial
mechanism, ethnic exclusion, in addition to finding that certain colonial legacies are positively
associated with incarceration. Although this literature is promising, there is a lot more work to be
done. As we have suggested, scholars tend to conflate incarceration with punitiveness. We recom-
mend exploring more direct outcomes (like sentence length) or disaggregating incarceration rates
in the manner suggested above.
Inequality
As discussed earlier, there is at present only so much that can be said about inequality in exposure
to incarceration. Although we know that incarceration is unequally distributed across social groups
everywhere we have studied it, we do not know very much about how these inequalities vary across
time and place. The first fact invites explanation: Why is group-based inequality such a stable fact?
And the second fact is also a research agenda: Why does inequality vary across time and place?
15 In
terms of Equation 1, this would represent a higher prisoners-per-crime ratio. Note that prisoners per
crime can itself be decomposed into admissions per crime and prisoners per admissions, which index the two
·.•�-
channels we discuss in this section.
6.14 Clegg et al.

As a preliminary matter, we can say that any inequality inside the criminal justice system can
be decomposed into inequalities in the differential probability of committing a crime (by group)
and inequalities in the treatment of those alleged to have committed crime. This suggests, as
above, that deeper explanations will divide by whether they are mediated by crime (e.g., racial
oppression leads to racial differences in crime commission, which leads to racial differences in
incarceration) or by the behavior of criminal justice actors (e.g., racial oppression leads to racially
biased legislation and punishment practices, which leads to racial differences in incarceration).
But what share of which differences are explained by which inequalities? And how does this vary
across time and place? To date, we do not think anyone can reliably say.
Conditions
Why are prisons much worse in some places than in others? Perhaps the most direct explanation
comes from the principle of less eligibility (PLE). Rusche (1933) observes that no society could
be expected to design a criminal justice system that incentivizes those at the bottom of the social
structure to commit crime. This means that for the average person in that position, the expected
returns from obeying the law must exceed the expected returns from defying it. It is possible
to show that this requires that prisons must be particularly terrible where life at the bottom is
particularly terrible.16 As summarized by George Bernard Shaw (1922, p. xi), “if the prison does
not underbid the slum in human misery, the slum will empty and the prison will fill.”
The PLE can help explain why American prisons are so much worse than Norwegian ones or
why Indian prisons are so much worse than American ones. Yet the theory is limited; it implies
that returns to a law-abiding life must exceed returns to defying the law, but it does not specify by
how much. Thus, even if the theory were true, other factors matter. Perhaps more equal societies
value people at the bottom more, leading to better treatment. Or perhaps welfare states cannot
afford to terrorize those they hope to reintegrate. Here, again, better conclusions await better data
and better tests.
Lessons
In reviewing the literature on the causes of incarceration across place and time, we are struck by
how methodologically underwhelming it remains. This is especially true of the quantitative work,
which mostly draws causal inferences from cross-national correlations between a given cause and
the incarceration rate, with other (highly correlated) causes partialled out via linear regression. But
the qualitative work, like the quantitative work, also tends to be restricted to the Global North
and the recent past, which can imperil causal inference as well. We must all do better.
A necessary (but not sufficient) condition for doing better is gathering more data. For ex-
ample, the fact that democracies have lower incarceration rates has led some to conclude that
more democracy causes lower incarceration, but a better test of the inference would be to exam-
ine whether, over time and within countries, incarceration rates rise after democratic transitions.
This requires collecting data before and after democratic transitions, across many countries, in-
cluding the past several decades in the Global South and from the late nineteenth century in the
Global North. Our own limited data collection efforts suggest that some canonical cross-sectional
inferences might not survive better tests.
Figure 7 shows that three common conclusions (more democracy, less incarceration; common
law tradition, more incarceration; and the Kuznets curve of incarceration) do not survive simple
16 Specifically, the theory only has this implication on the assumption that the returns to crime and the certainty
·.•�-
of punishment are stable. For more, see Lewis & Usmani (2023).

over-time examination. Figure 7a shows that across 39 transitions to democracy spanning coun-
tries in the Global North and South, incarceration rates in fact seem to rise after transition. This
immediately casts doubt on conventional wisdom about democracies and punishment. Figure 7b
shows that although common law countries today incarcerate more than countries with different
+/− Rate at transition 100
50
−50
−10 −5 0 5 10
Years from democratic transition
b
200
Continental
150
Common law
100
Scandinavian
50
1900 1950 2000

Year
c
200
Cross-sectional pattern
150
100
Within-country pattern
50
1,000 3,000 10,000 30,000
·.•�-
GDP per capita
(Caption appears on following page)
6.16 Clegg et al.

Figure 7 (Figure appears on preceding page)

Better tests, different conclusions. This figure shows the results of subjecting three different canonical
inferences to over-time tests, using the data we have collected. (a) Across 39 democratic transitions (limited
to 10 years before and after transition and countries for which we have at least 5 years of incarceration rate
data), incarceration rates rise after transition. We plot median incarceration rates across regimes, and
bootstrap standard errors (i.e., we sample regimes with replacement 1,000 times). (b) In the developed world
over time, a common law legal tradition has only recently become associated with higher rates of
incarceration. (c) The relationship between GDP per capita and the incarceration rate looks very different
across countries today than it does within countries over time. The blue line is a LOESS smooth of
country-level LOESS smooths (i.e., a summary of patterns), drawn across countries for which we have at least
100 years of prisoner and GDP data with gaps of no more than 25 years. Data from the forthcoming History
of Punishment data set (https://gist.github.com/ausmani23/76acff17387cbbc15559cc02bc11b991).
legal systems, this was not true 100 years ago or before. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, countries with continental legal systems incarcerated almost twice as many people. This
does not mean that a country’s legal origins are irrelevant but that any theory of the relevance of
these legal origins needs to be less present-oriented and, perhaps, conditional. Finally, Figure 7c
shows that the criminological Kuznets curve (a rise in incarceration with GDP, followed by a fall)
is almost the perfect inverse of the trend observed within countries over time.
Our point here is not to disprove existing theories, as our results do not license causal infer-
ences. We just mean to emphasize that it is not promising that these conclusions fail better tests. In
short, both quantitative and qualitative scholars have more (and better) work to do to understand
the causes of incarceration across place and time.
CONCLUSION
The United States has 4.5% of the world’s population but 20% of its prisoners. Like us, many
of the readers of this article will have cited this fact to justify the US-centric bent of their own
research. Yet because 80% of the world’s prisoners live elsewhere, it could just as well be cited to
license the opposite impulse. We should have more to say about punishment outside the United
States.
We have already argued that this kind of approach can make for better descriptive and causal
inferences. In this conclusion, we would like to emphasize that a major dividend may also be
conceptual and theoretical. General data encourage general theories. Reading study after study
in this domain, the overwhelming impression is that we have bent the stick too far toward blind
empiricism. That is to say, whether from country-level or small-N comparisons or from large-N
quantitative work, we are presently in the business of accumulating finding after finding. But, to
paraphrase Poincaré, a collection of empirical facts is no more a science than a collection of bricks
is a house.17
We have suggested some simple ways to give these findings some architecture. It would help to
be more explicit about mechanisms, perhaps sorting explanations (as we did above) by how they
affect the incarceration rate. Do they affect crime? Do they affect the penal balance? Do they affect
the probability of admission to prison or sentence length? Too many studies, even qualitative ones,
treat the incarceration rate as a black box.
It might also help to aim for less nuance in our explanations (Healy 2017). If the net conclusion
of the field is that political, institutional, economic, and cultural factors together explain every
outcome we study, this is not too different from having concluded nothing useful at all. The claim
17 “Scienceis built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an accumulation of facts is not any more a
·.•�-
science than a heap of stones is a house” (quoted in Muthukrishna & Henrich 2019).

that both X and Y have a nonzero effect on Z is compatible with two very different universes: one
in which X matters a lot and Y very little, or one in which Y matters a lot and X very little. We
should want explanations that tell us which.
In suggesting this, we are admitting that we think the goal of social science should be to de-
velop generalizable, precise theories of important outcomes. Not everyone will agree. Two of the
most widely cited writers in the field of comparative criminology, David Garland and Michael
Tonry, have both defended more idiographic modes of explanation. In his survey of what canon-
ical social theory tells us about punishment, Garland argued that broad, general theories reek
of “nineteenth-century scientism and [leave] little room for agency, contingency, and accident in
the historical process” (Garland 1993, p. 284). And in the same vein, Tonry has argued that “most
broad explanatory claims are wrong” (Tonry 2007, p. 39), and that “the best version of the story [of
penal policy] is distinctly local” (Tonry 2009, p. 379). Some may worry, as did one anonymous re-
viewer of this manuscript, that too much generalization may lead us to a place where our ambition
exceeds the state of our data or knowledge. In aiming for breadth, we risk losing depth.
This conclusion cannot settle these metatheoretical questions for the reader. But we can state
the case for the opposition. As Garland argues in Punishment in Modern Society, the ultimate pur-
pose of social theorizing about punishment is normative (Garland 1993, pp. 9–10). We might say,
today, that the study of punishment is motivated by a broadly liberal-egalitarian commitment to
address the suffering of the least well-off. To do this well, we think that our explanations must
be at least somewhat general. To reform or abolish the carceral state we need to understand how
it was built, which means, at the very least, generalizing from past to present. And to learn from
developments in punishment elsewhere (and especially from other attempts to reform it) we must
be willing to believe that modern carceral regimes share important causes in common. In short, we
cannot do without general theories if we want to make incarceration less common, less unequal,
and less awful.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
The authors are not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings that
might be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer, David Garland, and Rod Morgan for helpful
feedback as well as members of the History of Punishment team for superb research assistance.
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CR07CH06_Usmani ARjats.

cls July 27, 2023 12:48

Annual Review of Criminology

John Clegg,1 Sebastian Spitz,2 Adaner Usmani,2

Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2024. 7:6.1–6.21 Keywords

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6.2 Clegg et al.

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www.annualreviews.org • Punishment in Modern Societies 6.3

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Prisoners per 100,000

6.4 Clegg et al.

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Western Europe/ Sub-Saharan Asia/Paciﬁc Eastern Latin America/

Neo-Europe Africa/MENA Europe Caribbean

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Prisoners per homicide

25 Sub-Saharan Africa/MENA Latin America/Caribbean

6.6 Clegg et al.

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The developed world

1800 1900 2000

data broken down by gender.

www.annualreviews.org • Punishment in Modern Societies 6.7

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6.8 Clegg et al.

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100 200 300 400

200 400 600

0 500 1,000 1,500 2,000

www.annualreviews.org • Punishment in Modern Societies 6.9

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prisoners/people = crime/people × prisoners/crime 1.

6.10 Clegg et al.

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www.annualreviews.org • Punishment in Modern Societies 6.11

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50 100 150 200

Spain United States

0.1 0.2 0.3

6.12 Clegg et al.

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www.annualreviews.org • Punishment in Modern Societies 6.13

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6.14 Clegg et al.

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www.annualreviews.org • Punishment in Modern Societies 6.15

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+/− Rate at transition 100

1900 1950 2000

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Figure 7 (Figure appears on preceding page)

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6.18 Clegg et al.

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legacies, and incarceration. Punishm. Soc. 22(1):3–27

www.annualreviews.org • Punishment in Modern Societies 6.19

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6.20 Clegg et al.

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process. Ann. Am. Acad. Political Soc. Sci. 605(1):311–37