U.S. a World Incarceration Leader
With just 5 percent of the world’s population, criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations are “mystified and appalled” that the United States has nearly a quarter of its prisoners.
Bad-check writers and drug use wouldn’t necessarily get jail time in other countries, but they do in the U.S. And those criminals stay in jail for longer periods, the New York Times reports.
So how do other countries compare to the U.S., which has 2.3 million criminals behind bars?
Citing data from the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London, China, which has four times the population, imprisons a mere 1.6 million people. The Times notes, however, that the imprisonment number excludes “hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention” many of them political activists.
On the bottom of the list of the 218 countries the center studies is San Marino. With 30,000 residents, it has only one prisoner.
According to the Times, the more meaningful measure tracked by the center is incarceration rate. On that score, the U.S. is still on top, imprisoning one in 100 American adults. The next closest nation is Russia.
These high incarceration rates are credited with lowering crime rates in the U.S., but it is no longer a model for other nations.
“Far from serving as a model for the world, contemporary America is viewed with horror,” James Q. Whitman, of Yale law, wrote in the journal Social Research. “Certainly there are no European governments sending delegations to learn from us about how to manage prisons.”
