[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.