The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any independent democracy on earth. Every U.S. state incarcerates more people per capita than most nations.
In the global context, even “progressive” U.S. states like New York and Massachusetts appear as extreme as Louisiana and Mississippi in their use of prisons and jails, says a new report from the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI).
While El Salvador has an incarceration rate higher than any U.S. state, nine states have the next highest incarceration rates in the world, followed by Cuba. Overall, 25 U.S. states and three nations (El Salvador, Cuba, and Rwanda) have incarceration rates even higher than the U.S. national incarceration rate.
Massachusetts, the state with the lowest incarceration rate in the nation, would rank 30th in the world with an incarceration rate higher than Iran, Colombia, and all the founding NATO nations.
Many countries that rank alongside the least punitive U.S. states, such as Turkmenistan, Belarus, Russia, and Azerbaijan, have authoritarian or dictatorial governments.
The Prison Policy Initiative complains that in the U.S., incarceration has become the nation’s default response to crime. It says that 70 percent of convictions result in confinement, far more than other developed nations with comparable crime rates.
After protests over the 2020 murder of George Floyd, PPI says that, "Some glimmers of hope emerged that the country was finally ready to end the failed experiment of mass incarceration." More recently, many public officials have called for a return to increased incarceration
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