Talk:United Kingdom prison population

Population figures are ambiguous
The sentance "In 1900 there were 14,460 male prisoners, 2,980 female prisoners. In 1991 the total prison population was 42,000 and in 1992 it was 45,800." Means nothing without knowing what the population in prison per unit of total population was. Its hard to say whether 14,460 was alot without actually knowing what the population of the united kingdom was in 1900 and 1991. Also its ambiguous, the United Kingdom in 1900 was much larger than it is today, encorporating most of what is now the commonwealth - surely though 14,460 does not include those incarcerated in India, Australia etc.? Can someone clarify this for me please. If I get no response in 72 hours I shall research the matter myself and make the appropriate changes. Its undesirable to quote lengthy amounts of ambiguous data, this whole section begining with that sentance falls under that category I think.

Also I'd like to add that I think this article is generally lacking detail and inadequatley referenced. No offense intended to its author as it is well written - just lacking in actual useful or comparable information and links matched with unclear data and references. The new statesman (a far left magazine) seems like an odd source of reliable statistics of this nature, surely the home office would be the appropraite source of statistics and I'm sure they must be available. Refering to the japanese equivalent of this article it highlights some of this ones shortcomings. Perhaps using that as a base on which to enlarge this would be advisable.

US numbers

 * (although this is far short of the 702 per 100,000 in the United States).

This is wrong; the graph here indicates that the US figure has never been over 500 per 100,000. Pretzelpaws 17:43, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps not - tucked away inside this report there is a figure of 738 per 100,000 for mid-year 2005 - so I'm confused... Pretzelpaws 17:57, 22 May 2006 (UTC)


 * Propbably best to raise that as an issue on the US version of this where ever that is. Theres not much cohesion between all the different prison related articles as it doesnt seem to be a big area of interest or wiki-research. I suspect someone in the US is far more likely to have an answer than someone in the UK about that. I imagine it also varies immensly between different states.

Early history and political influences
The thought came to me, that figures on their own do not convey an awful lot, so I have added some background. I am not happy with it ( it's so easy to go off on a tangent) but I thought it would serve to attract some thought as to what could be added to the article, so that, more sense can be made of it.--Aspro 19:12, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

Merger proposal
I think that the content of "Prison population of England and Wales" should be merged into this article. The scope of this article fully encompasses the other, and both articles are quite short, so a merger wouldn't cause any size issues. This one is actually shorter than the other, and the fact that someone felt the England/Wales article needed to be split is kind of weird. Anyway, I think it is clear that the articles should be merged. — Twas Now ( talk • contribs • e-mail ) 20:46, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
 * I don't think the prison population statistics are recorded for the UK as a whole though, but rather separately as: England and Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland. The Prison population of England and Wales article is of a length to merit its own page. There is no reason why the equivalent could not also be done for Scotland and Northern Ireland.--Utinomen (talk) 09:19, 26 September 2010 (UTC)


 * i agree with the idea of a merger defintiley --Gerty (talk) 14:58, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

Merge tags removed as no conversation has taken place in over a year, and there is not a clear consensus to merge. At this point, it is safe to say the conversation is closed. Dennis Brown (talk) 18:46, 8 January 2012 (UTC)

Lead section implies 15% of population incarcerated
“for England and Wales, with an average of 14800 people in prison for every 100,000 people in 2006;” implies that 15% of the UK population were incarcerated in 2006, which is infeasibly high. The data for 2015 implies that .1% of the population are incarcerated. I'm going to remove this for now, but if someone has time to look into the incarceration rates compared to the rest of Europe, that would be great. George Makepeace (talk) 18:00, 23 June 2015 (UTC)