Among World Nations, Individual U.S. States Near Top of List for Per Capita Incarceration
by Matt Clarke
In June 2024, the nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) ranked world incarceration rates as if each state in the United States was a separate country. The shocking but sadly unsurprising result: All states placed near the top of the list, with incarceration rates that far exceeded those in nearly all countries considered to be major human rights violators.
El Salvador, which incarcerates 1,086 of every 100,000 citizens, topped the list. But right behind the drug- and gang-ravaged Central American country was the state of Louisiana, which cages 1,067 of every 100,000 residents. Mississippi came next, with 1,020, followed by Arkansas (912), Oklahoma (905), Alabama (808), Kentucky (889), Georgia (881), Tennessee (817) and South Dakota (812).
The list of states was briefly interrupted by Cuba (794), before Wyoming (785), Montana (758), Texas (751), Alaska (744), Indiana (721), Idaho (720), Missouri (713), Arizona, (710), Florida (705), Virginia (679), West Virginia (674), Kansas (648) and New Mexico (647). Only then did another country appear, the bastion of human rights known as Rwanda (637). That left Ohio (621) and Wisconsin (615) on the list before the U.S. national average (614).
Massachusetts had the lowest incarceration rate of any U.S. state. Between the U.S. average and Massachusetts lie the remaining 25 U.S. States, as well as the countries of Turkmenistan (576), Panama (499), Uruguay (424), Brazil (390), Thailand (377), Cape Verde (366), Turkey (366), Belarus (345), Costa Rica (343), Nicaragua (332), Namibia (318), Maldives (314), Russia (300), Chile (281), Peru (277), Guyana (271), Morocco (270), Libya (269), Georgia (262), South Africa (258), Argentina (254), Fiji (248), Azerbaijan (244) and Eswatini (243). Those are the nations our least-incarcerating states are grouped with.
But what of the least-incarcerating nations? The list of the 10 lowest is dominated by African countries: Gambia (22), Guinea Bissau (31), the Republic of Congo (33), the Republic of Guinea (34), Nigeria (35) and the Central African Republic (40). Also on this list is the Middle Eastern country of Yemen (35), Japan (36), which has the lowest rate among first-world nations, Pakistan (38) and Burkina Faso (39).
It is dangerous to infer respect for human rights from a low incarceration rate, which might just signal a proclivity for frequent and rapid executions. Though that certainly isn’t true of Japan because the country has no death penalty. Its low rate may simply reflect a cultural distaste for robbing citizens of their freedom or a lack of faith in mass incarceration. Still, some nations that are considered bad actors by the U.S. have much lower incarceration rates: Afghanistan (45), Syria (60), Angola (79), Hong Kong (106), Romania (124), Zimbabwe (138), Uganda (150), Serbia (162), China (165), Iraq (179), Albania (195), Venezuela (199) and Iran (228). In every one, the share of citizens behind bars is lower than in any U.S. State.
The report argued that the high U.S. rate reflected a simple but disturbing fact: that incarceration is the nation’s “default response to crime.” Indeed, 70 percent of U.S. convictions result in incarceration—“far more than other developed nations with comparable crime rates.” See: States of Incarceration, PPI (June 2024).
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