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"
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:
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
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"