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The political interest in preserving and expanding the carceral system has at least four interrelated dimensions, the manifestations of which can be traced both in penal policy and in statistical dynamics.
The first dimension is electoral. Penal populism, that is, the rhetoric of “toughness” on crime, is one of the cheapest and most effective political resources: it requires neither structural reforms nor investment in the social sphere, yet yields an immediate symbolic dividend; the rise of the average rate from 112 in 2021 to 127 in 2025 coincides in time with the curtailment of decarceration strategies in a number of Council of Europe member states.
The second dimension is security-related. The securitisation of migration, the expansion of the grounds for detention, and the responses of states to pandemic and wartime challenges transform deprivation of liberty into a universal instrument for managing uncertainty; the share of persons without a final conviction of 30 %, and in certain countries over 45 %, indicates that detention is applied not as an exception but as a means of preventive control over those whom the authorities define as a source of risk.
The third dimension is disciplinary in the proper sense. The Turkish example, where the prison population grew by 89,000 persons within a single year, demonstrates that the prison is the most reliable instrument for neutralising political opponents and for demonstrating the strength of the regime, while the Russian example reveals the reverse side of the same interest: prisoners are a resource of the state that can be expended on war whenever political expediency so requires.
The fourth dimension is legitimising. The very practices of preventing ill-treatment – monitoring visits, reporting, standardisation, risk assessment, classification of prisoners, electronic surveillance – can be incorporated into the panoptic architecture and serve its refinement rather than its overcoming. The discourse of human rights and the discourse of discipline not only coexist but mutually reinforce each other: the prohibition of torture as an absolute norm is not denied but instrumentalised, becoming an element of the legitimation of a carceral system that continues to reproduce what this very norm prohibits.
At least 12 million people are held in prison worldwide at any one time; taking into account the incomplete statistics of authoritarian states, unofficial places of deprivation of liberty and other unrecorded forms of confinement, the real figure may amount to 13–15 million. The incarceration of society continues because it serves the interests of those who make the decisions, not because it is legally inevitable.
