List of countries by incarceration rate
China. The rate of 118 is for sentenced prisoners in 2015 in Ministry of Justice prisons only. World Prison Brief: "1,649,804 [prisoners] at mid-2015 (via Asian and Pacific Conference of Correctional Administrators - sentenced prisoners in Ministry of Justice prisons only, excluding pre-trial detainees and those held in administrative detention). The Deputy Procurator-General of the Supreme People's Procuratorate reported in 2009 that, in addition to the sentenced prisoners, more than 650,000 were held in detention centres In China. If this was still correct in mid-2015 the total prison population in China was at least 2,300,000. ... 118 [rate] based on an estimated national population of 1.4 billion at mid-2015 (from United Nations figures) – sentenced prisoners in Ministry of Justice prisons only. (A total prison population of 2,300,000 would raise the prison population rate to 164 per 100,000.)" See also: Re-education through labor and Laogai.
Penal system in China
Hard labor still was the most common form of punishment in China in the 1980s. The penal system stressed reform rather than retribution, and it was expected that productive labor would reduce the penal institutions' cost to society. Even death sentences could be stayed by two-year reprieve. If a prisoner was judged to have reformed during that period, his or her sentence could be commuted to life or a fixed term at labor. The Prison Law of the People's Republic of China was enacted December 20, 1994. Since then the Chinese prison system has operated under supervision of the Bureau of Prison Administration which falls under the Ministry of Justice . All these divisions of government are controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. The head of the prison administration is Liu Zhenyu, his official title is Director-General. The prisons in the provinces are then further managed by local offices of justice. The Ministry of Justice states that it holds prisoners in over 700 establishments across the country. There are also thirty extra penitentiaries for juveniles. The corrections system in China has an official population of 1,649,804 inmates (mid-2015), including pre-trial detainees . The prison population rate is 118 per 100,000 people. Female offenders make up 6.5% of the total prison population and 0.4% of prisoners in China are of foreign nationality. In general, the prison population rate is going down in China. In 2008, the prison population rate in China peaked with a rate of 121. There was a plateau created in 2010 as the prison population rate remained the same . Some issues against human rights that prisoners experience are, “…executions without due process, illegal detentions at unofficial holding facilities known as “black jails,” torture and coerced confessions of prisoners…” . There is a laundry list of issues presented on the U.S State Department’s Humanities report for 2016. These include but are not limited to failure to protect refugees, extrajudicial disappearances of citizens, and discrimination against women and minorities .
The Criminal Law that took effect on January 1, 1980, removed criminal punishment from the discretion of officials, whose arbitrary decisions were based on perceptions of the current party line, and established it on a legal basis. The specific provisions of that law listed eight categories of offenses.