Turkey tops renewed spike in European incarceration rate

Turkey remained Europe's most prolific jailer in 2022 with an incarceration rate of 405 inmates for every 100,000 inhabitants, pan-European rights organization Council of Europe revealed Thursday. The total Turkish prison population was reported at 348,265 inmates.

Turkey's prison population rate rose 15% year-on-year, in line with a long-term trend observed since the failed coup of 2016, Marcelo Aebi, the lead researcher for CoE's annual penal statistics report, explained.

"In Turkey, there's a lot of people sentenced under anti-terrorism laws," Aebi, a criminologist at the University of Lausanne, told DW.

Ankara has blamed the attempted coup on supporters of the US-based Islamist preacher Fethullah Gulen.

According to the World Organization Against Torture, Turkey's incarceration rate rose by 89.3% between 2011 and 2021.

The next highest incarceration levels were reported in Georgia (256), Azerbaijan (244), Moldova (242) and Hungary (211). The lowest rates were seen in Finland (52), the Netherlands (52), Norway (55) and Germany (69).

"Eastern European countries and the Caucasus region, including Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Türkiye, exhibit considerably elevated prison population rates compared to their Western and Northern European counterparts," the CoE report outlined, using an alternate spelling of Turkey.

"On the other end of the spectrum, countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Switzerland, and the Nordic nations report remarkably low prison population rates."

More than 1,000,000 inmates in European jails

With erstwhile front-runner Russia no longer in the CoE, Ankara is now well out in front. But Turkey is far from alone in increasing its incarceration rate, as the report covering the 12 months leading up to February 2023 showed.

Moldova saw a dramatic year-on-year increase of 52.1%, followed by North Macedonia (25.5%), Cyprus (24.8%), Turkey (15%) and then Azerbaijan (12.5%).

The proportion of the population shut away in European jails grew 2.4% as a median in the survey of 48 prison administrations in CoE's 47 signatory countries. As of January 31, 2023, the total prison population stood at 1,036,680 inmates.

A similar increase was reported over 2021, when the prison population started to bounce back after the COVID pandemic.

As COVID-19 gripped Europe, street crime declined amid movement restrictions, judicial systems ground to a halt and some countries released prisoners to manage the risk of the deadly respiratory disease in closed institutions, according to the CoE.

Before that, the European prison population rate also saw a long period of decline after a peak in 2013.

Post-COVID bounce back or fundamental shift?

For Aebi, it's too soon to say whether the latest increase is a long-term trend or just a rebound from the pandemic.

"I don't have a final answer for that, but something is changing," he said, pointing to the example of Sweden, where the incarceration rate rose 5.1% in 2022.

"If you go to the press, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, they were saying Sweden is going to close their prisons [because they had so few inmates]," he said. "Now they have a real problem with gangs, and this is the real reason for the increase."

More than half of the main crimes for which European prisoners serve sentences are related to drugs and violence, Aebi emphasized.

Edited by: Rob Mudge