Um... Difficult to find a source, I think.

I found this, though : http://hdrstats.undp.org/indicators/265.html

Which makes for... well, see if you can work out what any of the numbers mean.

I'm looking at this list and most of the numbers quoted agree with that, though it has Saudi Arabia at 178. According to that list, the UK comes in at #87 out of 217. I'm not sure that I think of the countries higher up the list as being more right-wing; more as being higher-crime countries, really.

That's really useful, thanks!

Yeah, China makes that case very well. Having attended a few trials in China, there's a host of reasons that people believe that China's judiciary are willing to sentence people to harsh sentences at someone else's whim. Even with ASBOs, Jackie Smith's view that "the court of public opinion" should override the rule of law with the government's help, and Bowland Dairy, hanging out with PRC judges and witnessing a traditional judicial system reminds one that the problems are just graffiti on the Parthenon.

It's not just us who think that, though, it's also the Chinese. Corporate law aside, the people I was aware of moving through the system were all accidental criminals, drunken brawlers and the like. There simply isn't the professional criminal class that we have here. You can drop money and people in abject poverty will pick it up and chase after you to return it. People will go to amazing lengths to comply with the law. You find women walking alone, at night, all the way across the city, without fear. It's worth noting that Beijing is meant to be an anomoly, and I'm not familiar with other parts of China.

A lot of the confidence is based on false premises, of course. There's a pretty widespread belief that Chinese people don't rape each other (more civilised, you know). This seems quite likely to be false, a suspicion that I find enhanced by a strong government preference to suppress news of rapes that do occur.

Still, Monbiot's been to China. I'm sure he knows they don't have lower imprisonment rates because they're a bunch of peace loving hippies. The Saudis chop off people's hands and beat them instead of sending them to jail. It seems likely that Labor could adopt a similar policy, and that it would reduce prison populations substantially, but I don't think that would bring them closer to your ideals (it might bring them closer to Monbiot's). I'm guessing that deportation as a response to underclass crime is also helpful, as any prison substitute would be, but particularly terrifying ones.

In case it seems as if I'm advocating totalitarian government, I should make it clear that I'm not. I'm just saying that while Che was his executioner, I don't think that Castro's Cuba had many non-political prisoners, but that doesn't mean that we should be ashamed to be different. I don't want a high crime society, but I'd much rather have that than a PRC or Saudi legal system. I'm not familiar with Burma's legal system, but it doesn't surprise me that Monbiot might find it appealing in comparison with outs.

Seems entirely plausible to me.

The UK prison population was 61,000 in 1997. It's now over 80,000

As for the international comparison, these figures are a little out of date; there's probably a more recent version out there, but I don't know where.

It seems consistent with the way that any stupid idea from the USA will be adopted here.

This is my thought also.

The labour government acts on the basis of response to newspaper headlines. Furthermore, they don't really believe in constructing a policy environment or building institutions, and then letting them play out: it's all about direct control. Hence e.g. the list of people banned from the UK is a (fairly short) list of names, rather than a policy or set of rules.

So one day you get a newspaper report on some bad-looking statistics coming out, the reponse to which is some new layer of paperwork for the police to do. This makes the police generally demoralised and less effective. The next day there is a news story about someone with 11 million previous convictions/a psychotic who traded his medication for a chainsaw/etc committing a horrific (or at least newsgenic) crime, as a result of which some new range of powers for the police is announced with no obvious link to the alleged problem.

Often the new powers are a direct, pathetic attempt to compensate for bureaucracy or process-induced failure. Like the attempts to extend detention without charge, because it now takes more than 8 man hours simply to arrest someone.

Sentencing is a mess - the "tarriff" that indicates how long someone should actually serve has little to do with the length of the sentence.

Effectiveness of the justice system has long since been buried beneath political convenience of both pro- and anti-authoritarian agitators. Something similar has happened in education.