Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’ – New York Times
The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.
Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.
Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.
The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London.
China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China’s extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.
San Marino, with a population of about 30,000, is at the end of the long list of 218 countries compiled by the center. It has a single prisoner.
The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.
The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England’s rate is 151; Germany’s is 88; and Japan’s is 63.
The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.
2 Responses
I see this incarceration story here and there, and never see any hard numbers on how many of those in jail are violent criminals (that is, convicted of crimes involving violence and/or the threat of violence). I never see the author take a position on who ought to be in prison, and who not.
Here’s a question: Do we have higher incarceration rates because we have more crime? (By “crime” I mean any act which would be defined as a crime in any given nation we are using for comparison purposes). Is a free society like ours, with our myriad of protections for those accused of crime, naturally going to be prone to more misbehaviour?
Most women in prison are there for writing bad checks or drugs or similar crimes. Most of the men are there for drug crimes or burglaries. My nephew sometimes gets tossed in jail because he’s mentally ill and if he’s whacked out on the streets they don’t know what else to do with him. Usually he gets sorted into treatment, but the police shouldn’t have to be the gatekeepers for the mentally ill.
The three strikes law has thrown many into prison for very long sentences who really committed what are very minor crimes. One of my friend’s sons went to jail for a year because he was driving drunk and killed someone, what he really needed was therapy for his alcohol abuse problem. Good thing he was a tough kid who knew martial arts or he probably would have been killed or severely injured in prison. Another friend’s daughter served a year because she was with her boyfriend during a robbery and he talked her into taking a few swings at the old woman they were robbing. Not saying they didn’t deserve their time, but here’s the thing – they’re white. If they were black, they would have gotten much longer sentences.
A third of black men are in jail or have served time. Yet we’re told there is no discrimination in the country. Right.
A “free” society that locks up more of its people than any other country on earth. Some freedom.