What does that title mean you ask. Well it means that the US with approximately (~) 5% of the world’s population has ~25% of the world’s prison population. Yup that’s right, the US imprisons more people per capita and for far more offenses than any other country in the world, including the most brutal dictatorships.

Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.

The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London.

China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China’s extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.)

[snip]

The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)

The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England’s rate is 151; Germany’s is 88; and Japan’s is 63.

The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.

What a distinction. This is what you get when you elect conservatives, those father figures who can’t abide any dissension. First you had trickle down economics that didn’t (couldn’t) work and now trickle up punishment (the poorer you are the more likely you are to serve time.)

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