Research

"Death, Smoke, and Mirrors: Manipulation of Health Data in Liberal and Authoritarian Custodial Institutions" is an ERC-funded project under the leadership of PI Dr. Mikhail Nakonechnyi.
Project Synopsis

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.

Questions and Aims 

The puzzle that sparked the project crystallised during the COVID-19 pandemic. It became impossible to ignore that even in transparent rule-of-law countries like the UK and the US, authorities hesitated to release prison health data. In authoritarian contexts, such as Russia, accusations of falsified mortality data abounded. Drawing from my previous research on the Gulag — where officials released or transferred moribund prisoners to suppress reported mortality — I began to suspect that this bureaucratic penchant to conceal "bad news" might not be unique to the Gulag, but a much broader pattern across vastly different total institutions. Trump’s 2020 ploy with the Diamond Princess passengers, Cuomo’s concealment of New York nursing home deaths, and similar manipulations globally gave weight to this suspicion.

The project pursues two global aims: first, to test whether the concealment of prisoners' health data is indeed a universal feature of modern custodial institutions, and second, to explain why some systems — notably the Soviet Gulag — descended into extreme versions of this pattern (if it was indeed a pattern). Was the Gulag an outlier because of unique circumstances, or was it simply the most radical iteration of a more widespread bureaucratic malaise, directly prefigured by some precedents?

In doing so, the project intends to revise how global penal systems are classified. Instead of focusing on established typologies, it proposes a new taxonomy grounded in the veracity of health reporting. By centring health statistics as a defining characteristic of carceral regimes, the project not only contributes to the debates on penality, modernity, technocratic social engineering, and colonial legacies, but also offers practical implications for international prison reform and the ethics of palliative care in custodial contexts.

Approaches and Materials

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 (UK, US), authoritarian contexts (colonial 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 principle kinds of evidence. Firstly 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 contemporary legislators, activists, doctors, and journalists. The second type of principle evidence is 'structural contextual' proof, or the wider incentive structures and socio-political contexts which promote or discourage officials to manipulate data. The project assumes that death reporting in prisons and its relevance is highly socially constructed and dependent on various larger social expectations, customs, and factors such as but not limited to transparency, interinstitutional competition, capitalist profit structures, or racism.     

To tackle this demanding agenda, the project will assemble a dedicated team of three 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, 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, 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.

Defining Manipulation: A Methodological Clarification

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 source-based evidence.

Closely related is the habitual use of vague explanatory shorthand—terms such as path dependency, continuity, precursors, antecedents, blueprints, templates etc., 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 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 behavior to reductive and unsubstantiated narratives of alleged sinister intent;
  • 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;
    • 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. While it reduces the number of cases that qualify as confirmed manipulation, it improves analytical precision and guards against two perennial interpretative fallacies:

  1. Presentism: the projection of modern ethical expectations or statistical norms onto past actors;
  2. Structural determinism: 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 introduced by later observers.

Standards of Evidence

To separate manipulation from honest error or bureaucratic “noise,” the project employs two complementary standards of evidence:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.

Analytical Framework: Explaining Why, How, Who, and To What Extent Manipulation Occurred

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 prioritizes 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 intent 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, avoiding speculative claims and grounding its conclusions in documented pressures and incentives.

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 favorable statistics or penalized 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 practices:

  • 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.

The project also investigates how contemporaries justified or rationalized these actions—as administrative routine, institutional necessity, or benevolence.

3. Who (Responsible Actors)

Who carried out or condoned manipulation?

This question identifies specific actors involved (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 (e.g., number or proportion of concealed or reclassified deaths);
  • The effect on contemporary evaluations—whether distorted data gave the system an appearance of greater humanity, modernity, or effectiveness;
  • The consequences for posterity—whether historians, policymakers, or reformers relied on these distorted records to evaluate institutional progress, humaneness, or decline.

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.

Units of Comparison

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.

Cases