I’ve been enjoying how incarceration rates, politics, and alternatives are dominating the news today. I don’t follow this conversation closely so it’s been good to see some numbers and hear the different perspectives.
When I first started listening, last night, I heard the numbers presented as totals on CNN, like this list from the International Centre for Prison Studies:
| 1 | United States of America | 2,239,751 |
| 2 | China | 1,640,000 |
| 3 | Russian Federation | 686,200 |
That probably shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. But, I thought, the real question is how dangerous do we think we are compared to other countries. Or, perhaps, how evil do we think we are…
So I looked up the incarceration rates per capita, which, to be fair to the media, is how almost everyone is displaying the data. Here are the same countries (Plus Canada. My wife is Canadian so I like to make comparisons between the US and Canada.) picked out of a chart on Wikipedia:
| Rank | Country (or dependent territory) | Prisoners per 100,000 population |
|---|---|---|
| 1 |  United States |
716 |
| 8 |  Russia |
484 |
| 124 |  China |
121 or 170[2] |
| 133 |  Canada |
114 |
Apparently, here in the land of the free, we consider each other somewhere between 4 and 6 times as dangerous as they do in that repressive regime, China. And well over 6 times as dangerous as Canadians consider themselves. What do you think, Canadians? Are you 1/6 as dangerous as we are?
Nathen's Miraculous Escape 
August 13, 2013 at 5:29 pm
There’s a couple interesting quirks about China. They tend to have shorter sentences, though perhaps harsher while punished. And they tend to use hospitals — especially mental — as prisons.
That said, this rings true. The US is slow to run people through the court system, but sentences are long and offenders repeat.
September 11, 2013 at 9:56 am
One issue with these numbers is that a bunch of different levels of people are lumped in together. Some countries don’t really prosecute, or have made legal, a variety of drugs/possession, but the US heavily prosecutes. Some countries still use a form of corporal punishment for lesser crimes– so you might get, say, a caning for minor theft and let go, whereas in the US you would be sent to prison. Add in three-strikes laws where something silly (or two or three somethings silly) can put you in prison due to aggregate, and our numbers are conflated compared to other nations. The US also does a horrible job rehabilitating people while in prison, so we have habitualized people who can’t really survive in the real world and do anything to go back.