[farss]

I'm not sure that per capita is a very useful rubric to measure over time. Like I'm not saying there's no relation to population size, if you compare a tiny country to a large one, but it's not clear to me that there's a strong relationship - why a government would be expected to lock up 5% more journalists if the population grew by 5%. Or why if a country of 30 million jailed 100 journalists it should be necessarily be considered less repressive than if a country of 40 million jailed 100.

[hansvm]

Per capita naturally maps to the idea that people's behaviors are innate in aggregate -- given a particular context you would expect the same distribution of people to behave in a particular fashion (become journalists, become journalists who question authoritarianism at the wrong place and wrong time, have a fetish for murdering journalists, ...).

That isn't always a relevant idea, but it's a useful model that adequately describes a wide variety of phenomena. On the surface it seems applicable to journalist jailings; the count of journalists increases per capita, and if their behavior is independent of world population then you would expect (absent other information or constraining factors) for behaviors leading to imprisonment (not assigning blame -- this could be as simple as wrong-place-wrong-time "behaviors") to also increase per capita.