This project investigates how penal authorities, in both liberal democracies and authoritarian regimes, deliberately downplay prisoners' poor health for a variety of reasons, using a repertoire of statistical and rhetorical techniques. It poses "big questions" about the operational logic of modern penality and bureaucracy, specifically through the lens of prisoner health management and epidemic control. It scrutinises British metropolitan, Indian colonial, American, and Soviet-Russian prisons and camps from the emergence of the Western penitentiary in the late modern period through to the present day.
The overarching puzzle underlying this project crystallised during the COVID-19 pandemic. The crisis revealed that prison services in even more transparent, rule-of-law democracies like the UK or the US somewhat reluctantly published prisoners’ health data. Rumours alluded to the manipulation of reported statistics with the aim of making them look better in the court of public opinion. In authoritarian countries like Russia, activists even accused the penal administration of falsifying mortality and morbidity. This pervasive reticence of officials on prisoners’ health, regardless of context, intrigued me as a historian of bureaucratic malfeasance. From my research, I knew that functionaries of the Gulag, a system of forced labour camps under Stalin, systematically underreported sickness, epidemics, and death. They released and transferred dying prisoners to report low numbers to their superiors. Nevertheless, because the Gulag case was so distinct, I never looked for anything vaguely similar in Western democracies.
However, incrementally, it seemed that I began to discern some pattern or logic, driven by the desire of bureaucracies to conceal "bad news" about prisoners’ well-being from the outer world in wildly dissimilar contexts. Donald Trump’s attempt to artificially suppress the US numbers of coronavirus cases by locking infected passengers on the Diamond Princess ship in March 2020 made my suspicion stronger. Trump proclaimed that he does not "need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault." His stance evinced an explicit motive to avoid exacerbating politically sensitive statistics. The 2021 scandal around the concealment of pandemic deaths in New York’s nursing homes by Governor Andrew M. Cuomo’s administration and similar allegations against Russian hospitals made me entertain an even bolder conjecture. Did this putative pattern manifest, in addition to prisons, in other prison-like total institutions like concentration camps, asylums, residential schools, or hospitals? (Goffman, 1961) It seemed that the pandemic might have elucidated something all-embracing and profound but still poorly understood about the operational logic of modern total institutions worldwide. I also realised that this alleged pattern's obscure origins, manifestations, and heritage could be illuminated only through historical comparative analysis over a more extended period. COVID-19 is likely not the first time this presumed logic has emerged.
Therefore, the project's first global aim is to determine whether the penchant to conceal poor health data from the public eye is a universal pattern, intrinsic to modern total institutions, no matter the authoritarian or democratic contex or just happenstance. The research seeks to shed light on when and why this presumed pattern appeared historically for the first time, how it spread across borders and institutions, and how it changed over more than two centuries from the early 1800s to the present.
Nonetheless, as COVID-19 reaffirmed, accountable liberal polities still behaved very differently from non-transparent, authoritarian ones. Moreover, historically, even within the authoritarian spectrum, some cases are extreme (e.g., "states of exception" like Hitler’s, Mao’s, and Stalin’s camps). For example, one recent, untested argument posited that the Gulag authorities murdered several million inmates and covered up their extermination with deceptive releases of dying prisoners (Alexopoulos, 2017). This accusation, even if untenable, is implausible for most prison systems. It highlights something very peculiar about the Gulag case. However, it is still unclear what causes these fundamental ruptures between and within liberal, authoritarian regimes and outliers like the Gulag.
Hence, the project's second global aim is to explain why some systems become extreme examples of this presumed pattern of "everyday economy with the truth." The project disentangles precise historical circumstances when these extremes reach a certain threshold, and falsifying health data becomes a defining central feature of the system, even raising suspicions about the premeditated annihilation of prisoners via deception in certain cases.
The ambition behind the project’s aims is to revise the traditional way literature classifies penal systems globally. This revision is achieved by shifting attention to health and its reporting as a defining feature that separates various carceral regimes from each other, a neglected issue in theorizing prisons. Thus, Gresham Sykes’s "pains of imprisonment" omitted health (Sykes, 1958). Investigating penal healthcare reporting and its manipulation garners deeper insights into societies themselves. It comes with a whole set of behaviors and practices that reveal far more about how total institutions understand their role in different societies and the values placed on the rights to life of society’s deviants, offenders, and political opponents. Ultimately, the project will generate a new taxonomy of penal systems based on the criterion of health reporting and its honesty.
The interdisciplinary research effort, while historical, combines insights from medical statistics, penology, criminology, penal sociology, and bioethics. It seeks to offer scholars, governments, and human rights-focused NGOs a toolkit of quantitative and qualitative methods to detect various types of bias, including racial and ethnic, in historical and present-day sources on prisoners’ health. Beyond the strictly academic contribution to the debates on penality, modernity, technocratic social engineering, legacies of colonial violence, and total institutions, the project has implications for humanitarian pressure groups and international prison reform.
Objectives and Questions
1. To trace the origins of the "governance by indicators" (Davis et al., 2015), a bureaucratic obsession with quantification and resultant attempts to game the health reports in the early 1800s to their legacies in present-day institutions. To delineate how and why these malpractices changed over time. To reveal penal administrators' motives to conceal inmates’ morbidity and death and identify the most significant statistical and rhetorical techniques to do so in the case studies.
2. To identify similarities and divergences in malpractices to conceal health data between and within liberal penal systems (e.g., British metropolitan, convict lease in the American South, and present-day US) versus authoritarian ones (e.g., colonial Indian jails), including extreme cases (e.g., the Gulag). Most crucially, to expound why they appear, avoiding false equivalences and monocausal explanations.
3. To determine whether medical release and transfer procedures were animated by a similar rationale across all case studies: to sanitize reported data to avoid scrutiny and project an image of efficacy for intended audiences. To uncover if these procedures obfuscated the bureaucratically organised murder of several million prisoners in the extreme case of the Gulag. To assess if the Gulag was a death camp and if medical release comprised a crime of commission or omission.
4. To investigate the inter-imperial connection by testing the broader continuity thesis between the Gulag and the colonial concentration (e.g., British India) or overtly racist regimes (e.g., the American New South) using manipulations of health data as a case in point. To understand whether it is indeed a verifiable causal link or, conversely, a terminological rather than empirical similarity misidentified for causation.
5. To examine the intra-imperial exchange of practices to hide prisoner sickness and death between British metropolitan prisons and Indian colonial jails. To understand how indigenous prisoners' allegedly distorted health data reified the racial and cultural hierarchies of colonial society in India. To uncover the multivalent relationship between the prisoners’ health, death, and race/ethnicity in administration reports of convict lease penitentiaries and present-day US prisons. To compare colonial Indian and US patterns of essentialising to distinct othering of ethnic minorities in the Gulag’s medical reporting.
The following questions are considered:
Question 1. Did a universal propensity to occasionally conceal the poor health of inmates truly exist in Western total institutions? What were the material and intellectual underpinnings for it to emerge?
Question 2. How did this alleged pattern spread across time and space? Did it survive until the present?
Question 3. Are prisons and camps the only total institutions that seek to minimise the appearance of reported sickness and mortality of their inmates?
Question 4. Did British, Indian colonial, and American prisons sometimes misapplied the procedures of early release and transfers with identical rationale as in the Gulag – to massage reported health data?
Question 5. If this universal release-to-die practice indeed existed, what were the phenomenological similarities and divergences between the liberal cases (the UK, the US) versus authoritarian ones (colonial India) in causes, effects, and concrete types of deception? Why and when did they appear? What causal factors made extreme examples of this pattern (e.g., the Gulag) aberrant?
Question 6. Was the Gulag a death camp? Did six million Gulag’s victims die, concealed by releases?
Question 7. Where did the Gulag's malpractices originate? Were they somehow foreshadowed by antecedents in the deadly, racist Indian colonial or convict lease contexts? (colonial boomerang thesis) Or were they driven by a unique constellation of factors, following a Sonderweg, a special path (a sui generis thesis)?
Question 8. How seriously, in quantitative and qualitative terms, were the health reports in the chosen case studies vitiated?
Question 9. Was the degree of their unreliability in the case of colonial India so drastic that it reduced jail health reports to an elite representation of the empire to justify conquest?
Question 10. Did the presumed obfuscation of health data in Indian jails in some ways exemplify the "essentialised difference between coloniser and colonised"?
Empirically, the project binds together diverse cases through their shared use of early medical release and transfers of dying prisoners, procedures that predate the Gulag and persist today. While these mechanisms were ostensibly humanitarian, whether they were in fact misused to sanitise official reports remains an open and central question for this research. The project sets out to trace these practices rigorously, to establish the extent and nature of their use across liberal cases in the UK and US, authoritarian and colonial contexts in India, and especially in the extreme Gulag case. At every turn, the project takes a deliberately careful approach, firmly resisting the temptation to collapse vastly different regimes into one another. Rather than seeking false equivalences, it strives to understand each context on its own terms, respecting its particular historical, institutional, and political specificities.
The inquiry goes beyond the prison gates. It situates its findings within broader debates on modern state violence, colonial legacies, and the dark undercurrents of Western modernity. It rigorously tests whether the Gulag’s concealment of deaths can be traced to earlier colonial or racialised penal practices, such as the British Raj’s jail systems or America’s convict lease, or whether it represents a sharp break or an entirely sui generis development.
The project investigates the concept of manipulation, not as the product of grand conspiracy or broad-scale ill intent, but by following two principal kinds of evidence. The first kind is the “silver bullet,” or acknowledgment of manipulation by contemporary data producers such as prison officials or inspectors. Manipulation of statistics such as death rates served as points of contention in political and public debate not only between prison officials, but also among contemporary legislators, activists, doctors, and journalists. The second type of principal evidence is “structural contextual” proof, or the wider incentive structures and socio-political contexts which promote or discourage officials from manipulating data. The project assumes that death reporting in prisons, and indeed its very relevance, is highly socially constructed and dependent on larger social expectations, customs, and explicit and implicit value judgments about the value of life assigned to different categories of prisoners.
To tackle this demanding agenda, the project will assemble a dedicated team of two early-career postdoctoral researchers, each specialising in one of the core case studies, British metropolitan prisons, colonial Indian jails, and the American penal system. My role as PI is to lead the research on the Gulag and present-day Russia, to coordinate the team’s efforts, and to contribute archival research and broader framing across the cases. Together, we will build new empirical databases for all case studies featuring corrected mortality tables, cross-examine sources, and collectively author outputs that push the field beyond its current limits.
The project will deliver the first comparative, integrated history of bureaucratic malpractice in prison health reporting, combining methods from history, medical statistics, penology, sociology of organisations, and bioethics. It will produce a systematised database of concealment techniques, at least ten peer-reviewed articles, and a monograph with a leading academic press. The research will also engage with human rights organisations and prison reform advocates, contributing directly to contemporary debates on transparency, accountability, and carceral ethics.
This project examines and compares the manipulation of health data, particularly mortality and morbidity statistics, across four penal systems, the United Kingdom, colonial India, the Southern United States, and the Soviet Union-modern Russia continuum, each operating in vastly different historical contexts over a 200-year period. Addressing such a wide temporal and institutional range poses significant challenges. Chief among these impediments is the risk of retroactively projecting present-day assumptions about what constitutes deception or falsification onto historical actors.
Equally muddling is the tendency in comparative penal literature to attribute deceptive agency or explanatory force to reified abstractions such as Modernity, the Enlightenment, or state rationality, rather than grounding such interpretations in specific institutional contexts and empirical evidence.
Closely related is the habitual use of vague explanatory shorthand, terms such as path dependency, continuity, precursors, antecedents, blueprints, templates, and the like, which appear frequently without clear definitions or empirical substantiation.
To avoid these risks, the project adopts a deliberately narrow working definition of manipulation:
Manipulation refers to the contemporaneous acknowledgment by actors within a custodial system that data, especially mortality data, was distorted, misrepresented, or concealed, and that such distortion was understood at the time to be misleading, deceptive, or in conflict with prevailing standards of accuracy or truthfulness.
Crucially, this acknowledgment must come from those directly involved in data production or oversight, privileged insiders such as prison physicians, wardens, inspectors, or bureaucrats with institutional responsibility. Their proximity to the process of data production ensures that manipulation is not merely inferred but attested from within the system itself.
This stringent definition serves several purposes. It avoids any imputation of deceptive intent without direct evidence. It resists conspiratorial readings of sources, which reduce complex institutional behaviour to reductive and unsubstantiated narratives of sinister impetus and psychologising actors. It distinguishes genuine bureaucratic malfeasance or chicanery from clerical or transcriptional error, limitations in state capacity at a given time, flawed or inconsistent recordkeeping cultures, and other sources of inaccuracy not regarded by contemporaries as deceptive.
By requiring contemporaneous recognition, preferably in the words of those who produced or supervised the data, this definition sets a high evidentiary threshold. Indeed, no rational official will self-implicate, especially in written form, which makes extracting these “silver bullets” from the historical record extremely difficult. While it reduces the number of cases that qualify as confirmed manipulation, it improves analytical precision and guards against two perennial interpretative fallacies. First one is presentism, or the projection of modern ethical expectations or statistical norms onto past actors. Second one is structural determinism, or the inference of allegedly malicious intent from impersonal social structures. This disciplined approach ensures that the project’s findings remain grounded in what historical actors themselves knew, said, and did, not in assumptions or moralising introduced by later observers.
To separate manipulation from honest error or bureaucratic “noise,” the project employs two complementary standards of evidence:
Silver Bullet Evidence
This refers to explicit, contemporaneous acknowledgment, ideally from individuals directly responsible for recordkeeping or oversight, that distortion occurred and was understood as deceptive. Examples include internal memoranda, official correspondence, or published reports by prison physicians, wardens, statisticians, or inspectors. These sources provide unambiguous “smoking gun” confirmation of intent and awareness, forming the most reliable foundation for identifying manipulation. As noted, this type of evidence is very difficult to uncover, because, as a rule, no rational bureaucrat openly concedes manipulation in written form. The project therefore has to develop a calibrated methodology to find exceptions to this rule in each of its case studies, one that allows it to read the sources against the grain and extract evidence usually concealed by euphemism and technocratic routine. In the end, the project compiles a dataset of these bureaucratic slips of the tongue and acknowledgments.
Structural-Contextual Evidence
When no direct admissions exist, the project considers conditions that made manipulation likely or attractive. These include performance metrics tied to mortality rates, bureaucratic incentives and sanctions, patterns of early release for terminally ill prisoners, failures of oversight, and rhetorical strategies that reframed death data. While this kind of evidence cannot prove manipulation on its own, it helps explain how and why statistical distortion became possible and tempting for data producers, and how it reflected broader institutional cultures, administrative values, sensibilities, and prevailing social expectations about prisoners’ sickness, mortality, and penal reform. Essentially, structural-contextual evidence uses a seemingly narrow phenomenon, manipulation, as a window into societies themselves.
This project applies a structured analytical framework to each case study to determine why manipulation occurred, how it was carried out, who was responsible, and to what extent the manipulation distorted the historical and institutional record in measurable terms.
1. Why (Motive)
What compelled officials to manipulate mortality data?
The project prioritises silver bullet evidence, explicit admissions from prison physicians, wardens, inspectors, or others directly responsible for data production. Such testimony confirms both awareness and intent.
At the same time, motive is notoriously difficult to prove with incontrovertible evidence. Deceptive rationale may coexist with other drivers, such as fiscal restraint, bureaucratic routine, or genuine humanitarian concern in the case of medical release. The project is therefore careful to distinguish deception conclusively where possible, while avoiding speculative claims and grounding its conclusions in documented pressures and incentives. Although it often deals with massive manipulations, the project tries not to turn into a collection of materials for prosecution built on pre-determined notions of culpability and malicious intentionality in every single instance. It acknowledges that bureaucratic behaviour is very complex and that bureaucracies are very rarely driven by a single overarching motive, benevolent or malevolent, but rather torn by contradictory ones.
In the absence of direct admissions, the project considers structural factors:
Did low death rates correlate with career advancement or institutional success?
Were officials rewarded for favourable statistics or penalised for high mortality?
This inquiry maps the conditions that made manipulation attractive, even without explicit directives.
2. How (Mechanisms and Techniques)
How did manipulation occur?
This includes a range of bureaucratic statistical workarounds:
Releasing dying prisoners before death to exclude them from mortality registers;
Misclassifying deaths as “transfers,” “escapes,” or other administrative categories;
Delaying or omitting death reports, or selectively including them in official statistics.
However, numbers never stood on their own. They were always narrated. Officials always tried to tell a certain story, sometimes grounded in empirical facts, sometimes only slightly distorted by esprit de corps, sometimes moderately, and sometimes severely. The chief task is therefore to extract objective constraints from self-serving distortion. Hence, in addition, the project also investigates rhetorical techniques, namely how contemporaries justified or rationalised these actions.
3. Who (Responsible Actors)
Who carried out or condoned manipulation?
This question identifies specific actors involved, including principal-agent dynamics:
Did local prison officials act independently?
Were superiors aware and complicit?
Did central authorities ignore visible signs of distortion or tacitly endorse the practice?
The goal is to clarify whether manipulation was isolated or encouraged within chains of command.
4. To What Extent (Magnitude and Impact)
How serious was the manipulation in measurable terms?
This component assesses:
The quantitative scale of distortion, for example the number or proportion of concealed or reclassified deaths;
The effect on contemporary evaluations, namely whether distorted data gave the system an appearance of greater humanity, modernity, or effectiveness;
The consequences for posterity, namely whether historians, policymakers, or reformers relied on these distorted records to evaluate institutional progress, humaneness, or institutional conditions.
Manipulation mattered not only because it altered statistics in the moment, but also because it shaped how penal systems were judged, both by contemporaries and by future generations of interpreters.
To support consistent cross-case analysis, the project uses a standard set of units of comparison across all four core case studies:
Motive: What pressures or incentives led to manipulation?
Procedure: What deceptive methods did officials employ?
Oversight: What internal or external checks existed, and how effective were they against manipulation?
Outcome: What were the statistical, institutional, political, or historical consequences?
This full framework applies to four major penal systems: the Soviet Gulag, the convict leasing system in the American South, colonial Indian prisons, and British metropolitan prisons.