Once you’ve got a whole industry built around private prisons, taxpayer cash, and turning inmates into pure profit, it’s basically very hard not to send poor people to jail .
There’s a saying:
If you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Or: If you have a military-industrial complex oligarch, you crave war.
This’s the late-stage capitalism for you.
– The US is like 4% of the world’s population but has 25% of the world’s prisoners
– In California, locking up one person costs $87,000 a year. That’s more than going to Harvard.
band-of-horses on
To be fair we’re #5 overall, maybe #6 because I suspect North Korea has us beat too.
overzealous_dentist on
Interestingly the US rate is falling off a cliff and will be extremely low soon
Oh wow, I had no idea incarceration rates were so high in the US. Thank you for posting this!
I looked at the source data. Only four countries have higher rates than the US: Cuba, Rwanda, Turkmenistan and El Salvador, in a list of 224 countries.
The_Great_Man_Potato on
America is literally number 1 in everything yall can’t stop us 🇺🇸🦅💪
Error_404_403 on
Selection “by GDP” is misleading. Where is China?? Is Russia GDP smaller than that of Brazil?
sapmess2 on
Now repeat after me: “land of the free”
demonotreme on
India must be a crime-free utopia!
…oh, right
aminok on
I’m sure if the U.S. had a population that was ethnically 99% Japanese, its incarceration rate would also be super low.
“It’s actually super easy to mentally model progressive thought. Just imagine you really want to be seen as a good person and you lack the moral courage to consider 2nd and 3rd order consequences if doing so might make you look like a bad person.”
JoypulpSkate on
That’s more than 1 in 200 people in the US.
The typical US high school has around 700 students. If the numbers were perfectly averaged out across the country, that’s like 3-4 people of everyone enrolled in your high school in a given year being in jail at any given time in adulthood.
Pathetian on
Doesn’t really corelate much with other positive or negative metrics. Many countries have lower prisoner rates, but higher crime, suggesting a failure to jail people as necessary. Many countries have lower prisoner rates *and* lower crime, as well as just lower sentencing for violent crime.
It seems like obviously with 5-6x the violent crime of peers, you are going to have to put 5-6x the number of people in prison, or just let people go free just to avoid too many in jail.
Some crime is more morally subjective and you could reduce jailing there, but America simply has more of the shit everyone on the planet agrees isn’t okay, so we obviously aren’t gonna have prison rates like Japan with 20x the homicide rate.
libertarianinus on
Is this for prisons or jails? California has a population of 40,000,000 people with 89,893 in state prison. Thats 0.0022% of the population. That’s 2,200 per 1 million people. If 1% of people are broken and prey on people, would it be higher?
Edit; I see you used 100k so California is only 220 inmates per 100k where is the data from?
![[OC] Prisoner rates for the top 10 largest economy in the world](https://www.byteseu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/mdkb71w3dwrg1.png "[OC] Prisoner rates for the top 10 largest economy in the world")
12 Comments
Once you’ve got a whole industry built around private prisons, taxpayer cash, and turning inmates into pure profit, it’s basically very hard not to send poor people to jail .
There’s a saying:
If you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Or: If you have a military-industrial complex oligarch, you crave war.
This’s the late-stage capitalism for you.
– The US is like 4% of the world’s population but has 25% of the world’s prisoners
– In California, locking up one person costs $87,000 a year. That’s more than going to Harvard.
To be fair we’re #5 overall, maybe #6 because I suspect North Korea has us beat too.
Interestingly the US rate is falling off a cliff and will be extremely low soon
America’s Incarceration Rate Is About to Fall Off a Cliff – The Atlantic https://share.google/hx939Jfb6q3Fv6VS7
Oh wow, I had no idea incarceration rates were so high in the US. Thank you for posting this!
I looked at the source data. Only four countries have higher rates than the US: Cuba, Rwanda, Turkmenistan and El Salvador, in a list of 224 countries.
America is literally number 1 in everything yall can’t stop us 🇺🇸🦅💪
Selection “by GDP” is misleading. Where is China?? Is Russia GDP smaller than that of Brazil?
Now repeat after me: “land of the free”
India must be a crime-free utopia!
…oh, right
I’m sure if the U.S. had a population that was ethnically 99% Japanese, its incarceration rate would also be super low.
“It’s actually super easy to mentally model progressive thought. Just imagine you really want to be seen as a good person and you lack the moral courage to consider 2nd and 3rd order consequences if doing so might make you look like a bad person.”
That’s more than 1 in 200 people in the US.
The typical US high school has around 700 students. If the numbers were perfectly averaged out across the country, that’s like 3-4 people of everyone enrolled in your high school in a given year being in jail at any given time in adulthood.
Doesn’t really corelate much with other positive or negative metrics. Many countries have lower prisoner rates, but higher crime, suggesting a failure to jail people as necessary. Many countries have lower prisoner rates *and* lower crime, as well as just lower sentencing for violent crime.
It seems like obviously with 5-6x the violent crime of peers, you are going to have to put 5-6x the number of people in prison, or just let people go free just to avoid too many in jail.
Some crime is more morally subjective and you could reduce jailing there, but America simply has more of the shit everyone on the planet agrees isn’t okay, so we obviously aren’t gonna have prison rates like Japan with 20x the homicide rate.
Is this for prisons or jails? California has a population of 40,000,000 people with 89,893 in state prison. Thats 0.0022% of the population. That’s 2,200 per 1 million people. If 1% of people are broken and prey on people, would it be higher?
Edit; I see you used 100k so California is only 220 inmates per 100k where is the data from?
https://www.cdcr.ca.gov/research/wp-content/uploads/sites/174/2026/03/Tpop1d260325.pdf