Global Incarceration, Prison Capacity Expanding at ‘Alarming Rate’

Mississippi State Penitentiary, Photo courtesy Mississippi Health Department.

Around the globe, countries are expanding their prison capacity at “an alarming expansive rate” — despite widespread calls to reduce prison populations around the world, according to a Penal Reform International (PRI) report released Wednesday.

The eighth annual report of Global Prison Trends, co-sponsored by the Thailand Institute of Justice, says the incarcerated population is “at an all-time high,” with 11.5 million people are imprisoned today. That represents a nearly 25 percent increase in the past two decades.

The report outlines that 121 countries have tried to accommodate this growing population by expanding their facilities by more than 100 percent. Some 13 countries have had to resort to expanding over 250 percent just to accommodate the flow of people.

Looked at another way, 24 countries have built a total of 437,000 new prison buildings — often bigger and more remote than the existing ones. Governments are pointing the finger at prison overcrowding as the main reason for investing in new facilities.

To that end, experience and studies tell us that building new prisons is “not a long-term solution to overcrowding.” Yet, this expansion is happening anyway, the researchers note.

‘With overcrowding in prisons affecting every corner of the world it is clear that no government can build their way out of this problem,” Olivia Rope, the Executive Director of Penal Reform International, said of the findings in the report.

Rope continued: “The human rights of people in cramped conditions are at even greater risk with the combination of increasing violent conflicts, the impacts of climate change with disastrous natural hazards and extreme temperatures coinciding with the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic.”

Key Facts and Figures

Since the year 2000, this population has grown 24 percent worldwide, with the biggest growth spikes in South America (200 percent increase), the Pacific Islands (82 percent increase) and Central America (77 percent increase), the full report details.

With that, the only listed region to decrease its prison population was Europe, which saw a 27 percent decrease since 2000.

Globally, the researchers found five “key drivers of imprisonment” that land individuals behind bars across the world. The most common drivers of imprisonment are punitive drug policies, responsible for an estimated 2.2 million incarcerations.

Other factors include: discriminatory laws that target poor people and marginalized communities; extreme sentences that lead to long sentences or life sentences; the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, where many of the “decongestion” release methods have ended and people remain incarcerated; and lastly, underuse of incarceration alternatives where there’s been a focus on punishment rather than rehabilitation globally.

Vulnerable Prison Populations

There’s a staggering increase in the incarceration of ethnic minorities and Indigenous peoples, older people, children, and women, the data details.

“The increase in the number of women, children and other groups in prisons, such as ethnic minorities, are all trends that urgently need to be reversed,” Phiset Sa-ardyen, Executive Director of the Thailand Institute of Justice, said.

The number of women in prison globally has increased by 33 percent over the past 20 years, which is a higher growth rate than the male prison population, which rose by 25 percent.

Looking at the rates of incarcerated children, around 261,200 children are estimated to be detained globally, with the highest rate of child detention in North America (137 per 100,000), followed by Latin America and the Caribbean (77 per 100,000) where the highest number of children are detained (50,300), the report details.

In terms of Indigenous populations, native women make up 60 percent of female prison populations in New Zealand, and 48 percent in Canada.

Race and ethnicity was also a factor explored by researchers, to which they found a “disproportionate presence of Africans and people of African descent in prison populations, referencing reports from Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Italy, Portugal, and the US.”

Water and Sanitation

“Prison overcrowding and the lack of resources and infrastructure have led to a dire shortage of water in many prisons for drinking, preparing food, and for sanitation,” the report details, noting that the COVID-19 pandemic and outbreaks of other infectious diseases have impacted the quality of the water supply.

In Mexico, 60 percent of detainees with access to water report that it’s not safe for consumption because of contamination with toxins and sewage.

In the last three years in the United States, water in Texas prisons has been contaminated by arsenic, and Arizona’s prison water systems have been contaminated by petroleum from a nearby gas station.

In Cameroon, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe, women were forced to use buckets for human waste, to which they then had to clean manually. Similarly, in Iran, prison facilities note that there are only 5 toilets and 3 showers available for almost 300 women.

Moreover, in Myanmar’s Insein prison, people have developed skin rashes and lesions where they were forced to use dirty water for bathing as a result of overcrowding.

Overall, the researchers emphasize that all of these hazards and disasters are coming to the forefront of global attention — and the inhumane conditions and treatment must be reversed.

 “Expanding the capacity of prisons is not a viable, long-term solution to reducing overcrowding and the devastating consequences of imprisonment,” the report says.

The eighth annual edition of Global Prison Trends can be accessed here.

Andrea Cipriano is associate editor of The Crime Report.