Comparison of United States incarceration rate with other countries

Total US incarceration (prisons and jails) peaked in 2008. On January 1, 2008, more than 1 in 100 adults in the United States were in prison or jail. 2.3 million people (see table to right). Total correctional population (prison, jail, probation, parole) peaked in 2007. said that "it is the length of sentences that truly distinguishes American prison policy. Indeed, the mere number of sentences imposed here would not place the United States at the top of the incarceration lists. If lists were compiled based on annual admissions to prison per capita, several European countries would outpace the United States. But American prison stays are much longer, so the total incarceration rate is higher." Counting all inmates (not just those in adult prisons and jails) brings the number at the beginning of 2008 to 2.42 million inmates. This is by adding in inmates in U.S. territories, military facilities, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) owned and contracted facilities, jails in Indian country, and juvenile facilities. See chart below on the left: == More comparisons ==

In addition, the United States has significant racial disparities in rates of incarceration. According to Michelle Alexander in a 2010 book, the United States "imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid". The black imprisonment rate of South Africa could not have come close to today's American rate simply due to limited room. Notably, there's something of an international theme in countries comparing themselves to apartheid South Africa. There were instances where Australian journalists were drawing the same contrast relative to rates of imprisonment in their country. In the Huffington Post piece "Mass Incarceration's Failure", attorney Antonio Moore states "The incarceration rate for young black men ages 20 to 39, is nearly 10,000 per 100,000. To give context, during the racial discrimination of apartheid in South Africa, the prison rate for black male South Africans, rose to 851 per 100,000." A major contributor to the high incarceration rates is the length of the prison sentences in the United States. One of the criticisms of the United States system is that it has much longer sentences than any other part of the world. The typical mandatory sentence for a first-time drug offense in federal court is five or ten years, compared to other developed countries around the world where a first time offense would warrant at most 6 months in jail. Some of the latter Soviet Union's yearly incarceration rates from 1934 to 1953, however, likely were the world's historically highest for a modern age country. In The New Yorker article The Caging of America (2012), Adam Gopnik writes: "Over all, there are now more people under 'correctional supervision' in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag under Stalin at its height." == Comparison to OECD countries ==

OECD incarceration rate by country. Data is from World Prison Brief. All but four US states (the exceptions are Rhode Island, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Minnesota) have a higher incarceration rate than Turkey, the nation with the second highest incarceration rate among OECD countries. See: List of U.S. states by incarceration and correctional supervision rate. == See also ==