More than 250 journalists have been jailed worldwide in 2018, a number that has been reached for three consecutive years, an advocacy group said Thursday, calling it a sign that an authoritarian response to critical news coverage is “more than a temporary spike.”

The group, the Committee to Protect Journalists, said in its annual survey that the number of journalists jailed in relation to their work over the past three years is the most since it began compiling that statistic in 1990.

“Hundreds of journalists jailed globally becomes the new normal,” the committee said in a summary of its annual findings, which are based on the number of journalists imprisoned each year on Dec. 1.

For the third year in a row, Turkey, China and Egypt were responsible for more than half of those jailed, the group found.