“Dozens of similar [to Beijing’s] model institutions were built across the country, as county magistrates, city mayors, provincial governors and central governments, with varying degrees of success, actively pursued an extensive programme of prison reform: by the 1930s over 25,000 prisoners were detained on any one day in about sixty modern prisons, not counting detention houses and county gaols (this was comparable to the prison population of a large European country like France or England).
Despite the relatively low rate of imprisonment, congestion was the worst problem of the penal system. Many old county gaols were built before the introduction of the custodial sentence and new prisons rapidly exceeded their official capacity. Gradually throughout the republican period the prison population increased, and the building of new prisons always seemed to lag behind he ever-rising tide of criminal convictions. Collective pardons were one way of solving the problem of congestion. Continuing a long-standing political tradition of granting pardons to demonstrate their benevolence, most governments in republican China released a large number of inmates. Release on parole and on bail were two further methods widely used to lessen the prison population. In the 1930s the Ministry of Justice repeatedly ordered prison authorities to discharge conditionally prisoners on parole more liberally to reduce overcrowding.
Frequently, however, wealthy prisoners were the ones to be released, for instance by commuting a prison sentence into a fee. In Beijing it was reported in September 1930 that prisoners who could afford to buy their freedom were released, and two of them, both being leaders of drug-smuggling rings, apparently accepted the offer, paying an additional $5,000.
Those who lingered in prison tended to be overwhelming illiterate, male and poor. A detailed analysis of the social and economic background of sentenced criminals shows that the unemployed were the largest social category behind bars, followed by workers, farmers and merchants. Economic disparities were even greater: fewer than 7 per cent of prisoners in 1929 had property of any substance, and the great majority had no possessions at all. However, the most significant factor of social differentiation was education: only 0.5 per cent of men and women had a higher education, while just over 10 per cent had received a standard education. Literacy, rather than wealth or occupation, was a key determinant in a moral universe that viewed the lack of education as a prime cause of crime: a strong link thus existed between the penal philosophy of reformation, which represented illiteracy as immorality, and the actual penal regime, which predominantly targeted socially marginalised groups of young, poor and unemployed men. This observation was also made by contemporary criminologists.
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All the evidence shows that the prison population was dominated by the socially vulnerable, since criminals with any status, connections or wealth managed to negotiate their way out, while social elites could often avoid the judicial process altogether. Prison was, above all, punishment for the poor. But the poor were not passive, as is evidenced by numerous riots and escapes which periodically rocked the penal system. Overcrowding, poor food, lack of medical care, brutal treatment from guards-these were some of the vectors transmitting tensions that broke out into violence.”
- Frank Dikotter, “The Promise of Repentance: The Prison in Modern China.” in Cultures of Confinement: A History of the Prison in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Edited by Frank Dikotter and Ian Brown. London: C. Hurst & Co., 2007. pp. 280-282.
