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Top 10 Countries with the highest rate of incarceration 2022 United States — 629 Rwanda — 580 Turkmenistan — 576 El Salvador — 564 Cuba — 510 Palau — 478

Top 10 Countries with the highest rate of incarceration 2022 United States — 629 Rwanda — 580 Turkmenistan — 576 El Salvador — 564 Cuba — 510 Palau — 478 British Virgin Islands (U.K. territory) — 477 Thailand — 445 Panama — 423 Saint Kitts and Nevis — 423 https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/incarceration-rates-by-country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/incarcera...

gerdesj 4y ago
Those rates are per 100,000. That page also notes this shocker but it also quotes itself as a source at one point, so is it a decent source (?): "The United States leads the world in total number of people incarcerated, with more than 2 million prisoners nationwide ... This number is equivalent to roughly 25% of the world's total prison population and leads to an incarceration rate of 629 people per 100,000"
- usednet 4y ago
  The crazy thing is that mass incarceration is relatively new in the US. Are Prisons Obsolete by Angela Davis was a real eye-opener for me.
  - bitwize 4y ago
    Not even Angela Davis was totally opposed to prisons. She just thought they were for counterrevolutionaries rather than ordinary criminals.
  - barry-cotter 4y ago
    > The crazy thing is that mass incarceration is relatively new in the US. Indeed. Before the massive explosion in violence and disorder the US pioneered in the 60s the First World was substantially more peaceful. Less need for incarceration with much lower rates of crime.
    - mmustapic 4y ago
      The higher incarceration rates were caused by the "war on drugs" during the 80s.
      - barry-cotter 4y ago
        US murder rates doubled between 1960 and 1970. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-u-s-murder-rate-is-up-but-still-far-below-its-1980-peak/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-u-s-murder-rate-is-... It took until 1980 for incarceration rates to start their upward climb. Ten years is a remarkably long time for a doubling of murder rates to take to show up in imprisonment. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-imprisoners-dilemma/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-imprisoners-dilemma...
        pessimizer 4y ago
        > It took until 1980 for incarceration rates to start their upward climb. Ten years is a remarkably long time for a doubling of murder rates to take to show up in imprisonment. This is extremely dubious. The vast majority of people in prison are not there for murder. From a search, 15% of people in prison have a murder on their record. It's not TV.
- mcv 4y ago
  Wikipedia has slightly different numbers[0], with El Salvador instead of Rwanda at #2, but the fact remains that the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Though it seems to have gone down slightly; I recall that a few years ago it was over 700/100,000. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
- whacko_quacko 4y ago
  Good catch! According to the word prison brief the ranking actually looks like this (incarcerated per 100 000): El Salvador 605 Rwanda 580 Turkmenistan 576 American Samoa (USA) 538 Cuba 510 United States of America 505 I'd still consider this horrible, but making a point is no reason to use dodgy sources. From: https://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison_population_rate?field_region_taxonomy_tid=All https://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison_popul...
  - TylerE 4y ago
    Might be a difference in how people in jail (vs prison) get counted? Not sure if other systems have a similar distinction? For non US people: Jail is run by the local (usually county) government and is for minor(ish) crimes like writing bad checks, failing to appear in court, DUIs, reckless driving, things like that.
    - KingOfCoders 4y ago
      Thanks, didn't know (German), something new to learn each day. Would have used jail and prison interchangeably.
    - Avshalom 4y ago
      More importantly jail is where people are held before they are sentenced/found guilty. They are also yes used for shorter sentences. But you can still be jailed for years before you ever see the inside of a courtroom.
- azalemeth 4y ago
  It's also worth noting that the rate per 100k people can artificially inflate the numbers for some of those on that list – e.g. the British Virgin Islands has a population of ~30k people and Saint Kitts ~47k, so both some degree of rounding and a large degree of Poissonian-like fluctuation are probably to be expected...
- tommiegannert 4y ago
  > so is it a decent source (?): It's just stating that the source said 2M, which combined with the total population yields 629. Nothing wrong with drawing a simple conclusion from two sources. The sources for the prisoner numbers are clearly labeled at the bottom of the page: https://www.prisonstudies.org/research-publications?shs_term_node_tid_depth=27 https://www.prisonstudies.org/research-publications?shs_term... https://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison-population-total https://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison-popul... https://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/appendix_countries_2021.html https://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/appendix_countries_2021....
- tecleandor 4y ago
  Here they quote U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics from 2020 with around 1.7M of prisoners. That's about 15% lower than that number, but still quite high. https://www.prisonstudies.org/country/united-states-america https://www.prisonstudies.org/country/united-states-america
bismuthcrystal 4y ago
This is always stated as something bad, but perhaps the US is a violent society and it is doing a good job at keeping the violent behind bars? A similar argument can be made about health spending: if it's low then we are not doing enough, but if it's high then we are spending too much (i.e. we are inefficient), when in fact we might be allocating more capital to it because we value it more. Glad to hear any thoughts about this.
- martopix 4y ago
  > perhaps the US is a violent society and it is doing a good job at keeping the violent behind bars? The real question should be *why is the US "a violent society"? I think your post is a good example of what I think the problem in the USA is: the belief that the world is divided up in good guys and bad guys and you just need to lock up all the bad guys. But it's not like that. Violence, including incarceration, brings other violence. Poverty, inequality, ignorance, lack of health support for drug users, all bring violence. The US would definitely have enough money to turn deprived neighbourhoods into less deprived communities, which means less violence. But it doesn't do so for ideological reasons connected to this belief of good vs. bad. Sorry if I used your comment as an example, I do not mean it as an attack. But do ask yourself, why is the US a violent society and not Switzerland?
  - armitron 4y ago
    Is Switzerland riddled with violent gangs? Is it bordered by failed narco-controlled states that continuously smuggle people and drugs into the country? Does it have big chunks of the population living in inner city crime-infested ghettos? These are hard problems and can't be imagined away with "The US would definitely have enough money to turn deprived neighbourhoods into less deprived communities, which means less violence". We saw what well-meaning but supremely naive ideologically-driven policies lead to, in SF and Chicago and Seattle and LA. If that's the world you want to live in, all the best (but it won't be long before you start running for the exit).
    - qlm 4y ago
noduerme 4y ago
Russia doesn't publish its incarceration stats, apparently. Also, would the millions of Uighurs in concentration camps in China be considered "incarcerated" or is this simply a definition left to non-autocratic democracies?
- rags2riches 4y ago
  The Wagner PMC is recruiting cannon fodder for the war in Ukraine in Russian prisons. The Russian incarceration numbers may be improving drastically as we speak!
- trasz 4y ago
  Even Zenz and associated media don’t claim there are millions. And yes, even if you add them it still looks much better than US.
  - areyousure 4y ago
    In case anyone is curious, one of the largest numbers claimed by Adrian Zenz is "1.8 million" in the following article: https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/01/china-documents-uighur-genocidal-sterilization-xinjiang/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/01/china-documents-uighur-... > Since 2017, up to 1.8 million Uighurs, Kazaks, and other Turkic minority groups in the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang have been swept up in what is probably the largest incarceration of an ethnoreligious minority since the Holocaust.
    - trasz 4y ago
      Adding the right minority groups will give you however high number you need, but even he admits it’s not just Uighurs. And the result is still better than US incarceration ratios. (Or course this about largest incarceration is bullshit too, but hey, he needs to be making money somehow, right?)
- FriedrichN 4y ago
  One would think think detaining a million Uyghurs would equate to incarceration. I certainly do think so. But on the other hand, if you need to compare yourself to countries such as China and Russia and have your defense be "well at least we don't have concentration camps", you know you have work to do. Maybe the US doesn't have the highest incarceration rate, be it per capita or absolute, but it does have the highest rate of incarceration of any modern 'free' society. And that is a shame.
gertrunde 4y ago
I was surprised to see BVI & Saint Kitts on that list, although it seems like the figures are right, just a bit odd, with the way the rates are given as number of prisoners per 100k people. BVI - Prison population ~140-150, total population ~30k SK&N - Prison population ~200, total population ~50k
KingOfCoders 4y ago
One of the reasons (there are many others) US unemployment rates can't be compared to Europe.
- dncornholio 4y ago
  Why not? What's so special about US that you think it should be compared differently? In this case, I think numbers are numbers.
  - KingOfCoders 4y ago
    If you put millions of people (higher percentage than countries in Europe e.G) into prison there are less people unemployed. That doesn't say something about your economy though, for which, beside GDP, the unemployement rate very often is a proxy. The biggest other reason: Unemployement rate in Europe is mostly calculated by the number of people getting benefits and looking for a job (roughly) (+ in Germany if they work less than 15h/week). The US calls a sample of housholds (some 10k) and asks if the people in the household actively look for jobs but don't have one. In that case they are counted as jobless.
viridian 4y ago
The rest of the world used to be behind by at least a factor of 2. Bad as it is, things are actually much better than in 2010, where just over 1% (1,000 per 100,000) of the total population (1.3% of adults) were in prison. This number is likely to continue to decrease, as sentences have gotten shorter over time, and those have a huge, huge lag time. Your average prosecutor has, for better or worse, liberalized significantly from 1980 to now, even when compared to the general public.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hooby 4y ago
It's also interesting to compare that with other countries. United States - 629 Canada - 104 Greenland - 126 Mexico - 166 Germany - 69 Russia - 325 Iceland - 33 Japan - 38 Norway - 49 China - 121 Vietnam - 128 England and Wales - 130 Australia - 160 Hungary - 169 Iran - 228 Lithuania - 216 (= highest of all EU countries)
bequanna 4y ago
I see this cited very often, but what exactly should we take away from this? Just some general idea that "too many" people are in prison? I think most people agree that low-level drug offenders shouldn't be filling our prisons. But most people who live/work/frequent urban areas will have a steady stream of anecdotes about someone being mugged or otherwise experiencing violence, serious property crime, open drug, etc. How can we reconcile the fact that we still encounter too many dangerous, antisocial people with the fact that we have high incarceration rates?
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > what exactly should we take away from this? Just some general idea that "too many" people are in prison? Yes. Same as when we compare what proportion of GDP we spend on health care and compare it to other countries with longer lifespans. We're supposed to take away the general idea that we are spending too much on too little healthcare. When we look at how much murder we have per capita and compare it to our number of prisoners per capita, we should take away the fact that we're getting too little murder reduction for too much imprisoning of people. > How can we reconcile the fact that we still encounter too many dangerous, antisocial people with the fact that we have high incarceration rates? We don't bother. If one's attempted solution of incarcerating poor people makes violence worse, the answer is obviously to incarcerate even more people.
- saila 4y ago
  I've lived in an urban area for the last ~25 years and I certainly don't have a "steady stream" of anecdotes of the type of crime you're describing. On the other hand, there is a steady stream of news articles about street crime, which often seems to portray the situation as worse than it is. People that comment under news headlines on Twitter, for example, sometimes seem completely detached from reality, thinking they'll be murdered in a Mad Max hellscape if they cross some imagined urban boundary (but many of these people have an ideological agenda, so it's not clear whether they actually believe this). Of course, there are issues in the city, just like there is everywhere, including distracted drivers (my worst fear), domestic abuse, and so on. Street crime certainly does exist, and is worse in some areas for sure, but is it really the biggest threat to our everyday safety? It's kind of like how my mom gets caught up worrying about gangs, and I always ask her if she's ever had an interaction with a gang member (the answer is always no). Sure, gangs exist and sometimes do bad things to uninvolved people, but if you compare, for example, domestic abuse or negligent car crashes, those are far more of a threat to most of us commenting here than gangs ever will be. EDIT: And to the extent that the U.S. does have more crime/incarceration than other countries, I'd ask what we're doing wrong, or more neutrally, what's different about our approach? One major issue is that our prison system seems particularly ineffective at rehabilitation and reintegrating people into society, so recidivism is high.

gerdesj 4y ago

Those rates are per 100,000. That page also notes this shocker but it also quotes itself as a source at one point, so is it a decent source (?): "The United States leads the world in total number of people incarcerated, with more than 2 million prisoners nationwide ... This number is equivalent to roughly 25% of the world's total prison population and leads to an incarceration rate of 629 people per 100,000"

usednet 4y ago
The crazy thing is that mass incarceration is relatively new in the US. Are Prisons Obsolete by Angela Davis was a real eye-opener for me.
- bitwize 4y ago
  Not even Angela Davis was totally opposed to prisons. She just thought they were for counterrevolutionaries rather than ordinary criminals.
- barry-cotter 4y ago
  > The crazy thing is that mass incarceration is relatively new in the US. Indeed. Before the massive explosion in violence and disorder the US pioneered in the 60s the First World was substantially more peaceful. Less need for incarceration with much lower rates of crime.
  - mmustapic 4y ago
    The higher incarceration rates were caused by the "war on drugs" during the 80s.
    - barry-cotter 4y ago
      US murder rates doubled between 1960 and 1970. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-u-s-murder-rate-is-up-but-still-far-below-its-1980-peak/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-u-s-murder-rate-is-... It took until 1980 for incarceration rates to start their upward climb. Ten years is a remarkably long time for a doubling of murder rates to take to show up in imprisonment. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-imprisoners-dilemma/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-imprisoners-dilemma...
      - pessimizer 4y ago
        > It took until 1980 for incarceration rates to start their upward climb. Ten years is a remarkably long time for a doubling of murder rates to take to show up in imprisonment. This is extremely dubious. The vast majority of people in prison are not there for murder. From a search, 15% of people in prison have a murder on their record. It's not TV.
mcv 4y ago
Wikipedia has slightly different numbers[0], with El Salvador instead of Rwanda at #2, but the fact remains that the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Though it seems to have gone down slightly; I recall that a few years ago it was over 700/100,000. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
whacko_quacko 4y ago
Good catch! According to the word prison brief the ranking actually looks like this (incarcerated per 100 000): El Salvador 605 Rwanda 580 Turkmenistan 576 American Samoa (USA) 538 Cuba 510 United States of America 505 I'd still consider this horrible, but making a point is no reason to use dodgy sources. From: https://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison_population_rate?field_region_taxonomy_tid=All https://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison_popul...
- TylerE 4y ago
  Might be a difference in how people in jail (vs prison) get counted? Not sure if other systems have a similar distinction? For non US people: Jail is run by the local (usually county) government and is for minor(ish) crimes like writing bad checks, failing to appear in court, DUIs, reckless driving, things like that.
  - KingOfCoders 4y ago
    Thanks, didn't know (German), something new to learn each day. Would have used jail and prison interchangeably.
  - Avshalom 4y ago
    More importantly jail is where people are held before they are sentenced/found guilty. They are also yes used for shorter sentences. But you can still be jailed for years before you ever see the inside of a courtroom.
azalemeth 4y ago
It's also worth noting that the rate per 100k people can artificially inflate the numbers for some of those on that list – e.g. the British Virgin Islands has a population of ~30k people and Saint Kitts ~47k, so both some degree of rounding and a large degree of Poissonian-like fluctuation are probably to be expected...
tommiegannert 4y ago
> so is it a decent source (?): It's just stating that the source said 2M, which combined with the total population yields 629. Nothing wrong with drawing a simple conclusion from two sources. The sources for the prisoner numbers are clearly labeled at the bottom of the page: https://www.prisonstudies.org/research-publications?shs_term_node_tid_depth=27 https://www.prisonstudies.org/research-publications?shs_term... https://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison-population-total https://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison-popul... https://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/appendix_countries_2021.html https://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/appendix_countries_2021....
tecleandor 4y ago
Here they quote U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics from 2020 with around 1.7M of prisoners. That's about 15% lower than that number, but still quite high. https://www.prisonstudies.org/country/united-states-america https://www.prisonstudies.org/country/united-states-america

bismuthcrystal 4y ago

This is always stated as something bad, but perhaps the US is a violent society and it is doing a good job at keeping the violent behind bars? A similar argument can be made about health spending: if it's low then we are not doing enough, but if it's high then we are spending too much (i.e. we are inefficient), when in fact we might be allocating more capital to it because we value it more. Glad to hear any thoughts about this.

martopix 4y ago
> perhaps the US is a violent society and it is doing a good job at keeping the violent behind bars? The real question should be *why is the US "a violent society"? I think your post is a good example of what I think the problem in the USA is: the belief that the world is divided up in good guys and bad guys and you just need to lock up all the bad guys. But it's not like that. Violence, including incarceration, brings other violence. Poverty, inequality, ignorance, lack of health support for drug users, all bring violence. The US would definitely have enough money to turn deprived neighbourhoods into less deprived communities, which means less violence. But it doesn't do so for ideological reasons connected to this belief of good vs. bad. Sorry if I used your comment as an example, I do not mean it as an attack. But do ask yourself, why is the US a violent society and not Switzerland?
- armitron 4y ago
  Is Switzerland riddled with violent gangs? Is it bordered by failed narco-controlled states that continuously smuggle people and drugs into the country? Does it have big chunks of the population living in inner city crime-infested ghettos? These are hard problems and can't be imagined away with "The US would definitely have enough money to turn deprived neighbourhoods into less deprived communities, which means less violence". We saw what well-meaning but supremely naive ideologically-driven policies lead to, in SF and Chicago and Seattle and LA. If that's the world you want to live in, all the best (but it won't be long before you start running for the exit).
  - qlm 4y ago

noduerme 4y ago

Russia doesn't publish its incarceration stats, apparently. Also, would the millions of Uighurs in concentration camps in China be considered "incarcerated" or is this simply a definition left to non-autocratic democracies?

rags2riches 4y ago
The Wagner PMC is recruiting cannon fodder for the war in Ukraine in Russian prisons. The Russian incarceration numbers may be improving drastically as we speak!
trasz 4y ago
Even Zenz and associated media don’t claim there are millions. And yes, even if you add them it still looks much better than US.
- areyousure 4y ago
  In case anyone is curious, one of the largest numbers claimed by Adrian Zenz is "1.8 million" in the following article: https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/01/china-documents-uighur-genocidal-sterilization-xinjiang/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/01/china-documents-uighur-... > Since 2017, up to 1.8 million Uighurs, Kazaks, and other Turkic minority groups in the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang have been swept up in what is probably the largest incarceration of an ethnoreligious minority since the Holocaust.
  - trasz 4y ago
    Adding the right minority groups will give you however high number you need, but even he admits it’s not just Uighurs. And the result is still better than US incarceration ratios. (Or course this about largest incarceration is bullshit too, but hey, he needs to be making money somehow, right?)
FriedrichN 4y ago
One would think think detaining a million Uyghurs would equate to incarceration. I certainly do think so. But on the other hand, if you need to compare yourself to countries such as China and Russia and have your defense be "well at least we don't have concentration camps", you know you have work to do. Maybe the US doesn't have the highest incarceration rate, be it per capita or absolute, but it does have the highest rate of incarceration of any modern 'free' society. And that is a shame.

gertrunde 4y ago

I was surprised to see BVI & Saint Kitts on that list, although it seems like the figures are right, just a bit odd, with the way the rates are given as number of prisoners per 100k people. BVI - Prison population ~140-150, total population ~30k SK&N - Prison population ~200, total population ~50k

KingOfCoders 4y ago

One of the reasons (there are many others) US unemployment rates can't be compared to Europe.

dncornholio 4y ago
Why not? What's so special about US that you think it should be compared differently? In this case, I think numbers are numbers.
- KingOfCoders 4y ago
  If you put millions of people (higher percentage than countries in Europe e.G) into prison there are less people unemployed. That doesn't say something about your economy though, for which, beside GDP, the unemployement rate very often is a proxy. The biggest other reason: Unemployement rate in Europe is mostly calculated by the number of people getting benefits and looking for a job (roughly) (+ in Germany if they work less than 15h/week). The US calls a sample of housholds (some 10k) and asks if the people in the household actively look for jobs but don't have one. In that case they are counted as jobless.

viridian 4y ago

The rest of the world used to be behind by at least a factor of 2. Bad as it is, things are actually much better than in 2010, where just over 1% (1,000 per 100,000) of the total population (1.3% of adults) were in prison. This number is likely to continue to decrease, as sentences have gotten shorter over time, and those have a huge, huge lag time. Your average prosecutor has, for better or worse, liberalized significantly from 1980 to now, even when compared to the general public.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

hooby 4y ago

It's also interesting to compare that with other countries. United States - 629 Canada - 104 Greenland - 126 Mexico - 166 Germany - 69 Russia - 325 Iceland - 33 Japan - 38 Norway - 49 China - 121 Vietnam - 128 England and Wales - 130 Australia - 160 Hungary - 169 Iran - 228 Lithuania - 216 (= highest of all EU countries)

bequanna 4y ago

I see this cited very often, but what exactly should we take away from this? Just some general idea that "too many" people are in prison? I think most people agree that low-level drug offenders shouldn't be filling our prisons. But most people who live/work/frequent urban areas will have a steady stream of anecdotes about someone being mugged or otherwise experiencing violence, serious property crime, open drug, etc. How can we reconcile the fact that we still encounter too many dangerous, antisocial people with the fact that we have high incarceration rates?

pessimizer 4y ago
> what exactly should we take away from this? Just some general idea that "too many" people are in prison? Yes. Same as when we compare what proportion of GDP we spend on health care and compare it to other countries with longer lifespans. We're supposed to take away the general idea that we are spending too much on too little healthcare. When we look at how much murder we have per capita and compare it to our number of prisoners per capita, we should take away the fact that we're getting too little murder reduction for too much imprisoning of people. > How can we reconcile the fact that we still encounter too many dangerous, antisocial people with the fact that we have high incarceration rates? We don't bother. If one's attempted solution of incarcerating poor people makes violence worse, the answer is obviously to incarcerate even more people.
saila 4y ago
I've lived in an urban area for the last ~25 years and I certainly don't have a "steady stream" of anecdotes of the type of crime you're describing. On the other hand, there is a steady stream of news articles about street crime, which often seems to portray the situation as worse than it is. People that comment under news headlines on Twitter, for example, sometimes seem completely detached from reality, thinking they'll be murdered in a Mad Max hellscape if they cross some imagined urban boundary (but many of these people have an ideological agenda, so it's not clear whether they actually believe this). Of course, there are issues in the city, just like there is everywhere, including distracted drivers (my worst fear), domestic abuse, and so on. Street crime certainly does exist, and is worse in some areas for sure, but is it really the biggest threat to our everyday safety? It's kind of like how my mom gets caught up worrying about gangs, and I always ask her if she's ever had an interaction with a gang member (the answer is always no). Sure, gangs exist and sometimes do bad things to uninvolved people, but if you compare, for example, domestic abuse or negligent car crashes, those are far more of a threat to most of us commenting here than gangs ever will be. EDIT: And to the extent that the U.S. does have more crime/incarceration than other countries, I'd ask what we're doing wrong, or more neutrally, what's different about our approach? One major issue is that our prison system seems particularly ineffective at rehabilitation and reintegrating people into society, so recidivism is high.