Three - Composition of prison populations worldwide

Summary

Collating statistics on the backgrounds or demographic characteristics of prisoners worldwide is fraught with difficulty. Official data on the composition of national prison populations are often simply not available, and what information is available may provide little or no scope for meaningful comparison between jurisdictions because of differences in penal policy, recording practices or definitions. For example, in Chapter Two we briefly outlined the particular difficulty in regard to prisons data on children.

This chapter is therefore limited to discussion of two important sub-groups within national prison populations, on both of which reasonably comprehensive data are available: first, prisoners held on remand; second, women prisoners.

Remand prisoners – including pre-trial detainees

Remand prisoners are defined here, in broad terms, as those who have been detained in custody following a judicial or other legal process relating to alleged criminal activity, but have not (yet) been tried, convicted or definitively sentenced by a court for the offence(s). In many jurisdictions, the term ‘pre-trial detainees’ is most commonly used to refer to individuals who have been remanded in custody, but we have opted to use the term ‘remand’ here as it is more obviously broad in scope.1 Specifically, in this volume ‘remand prisoners’ are understood to be those who are at any one of the following four stages of the criminal justice process:

• • the ‘pre-court’ stage, after the decision has been made to proceed with the case but while further investigations are continuing or, if these are completed, while ‘awaiting trial’ or other court process;

• • the ‘court’ stage, while the case is being heard at court for the purpose of determining whether the suspect is guilty or not;

• • the ‘convicted unsentenced’ stage, after the offender has been convicted at court but before the sentence has been passed;

• • the ‘awaiting final sentence’ stage, when the offender has been provisionally sentenced by the court but is awaiting the result of an appeal process which occurs before the definitive sentence is confirmed.

Whether and the extent to which cases pass through each of the stages varies widely between and within legal systems. Also variable are the ways in which individuals within the above categories are classified or recorded according to official prison statistics.