Incarceration rates per 100,000 people
The Prison Policy Initiative is out with a new states of incarceration report, which shows that most states would be world leaders when it comes to imprisoning their citizens if they were countries of their own.
Tennessee ranks 10th on the list at 848 per 100,000 people. For space reasons, we've cropped the chart above so that is only shows the top 20, and you'll noticed that there are not countries listed. That's because when it comes to incarceration rates per 100,000 people, more than half of these United States rank above all nations with at least a half million people in total population.
From the report:
The U.S. incarcerates 693 people for every 100,000 residents, more than any other country. In fact, our rate of incarceration is more than five times higher than most of the countries in the world. Although our level of crime is comparable to that of other stable, internally secure, industrialized nations, the U.S. has an incarceration rate that far exceeds every other country.Nearly all of the countries with relatively high incarceration rates share the experience of recent large-scale internal conflict. But the United States, which has enjoyed a long history of political stability and hasn’t had a civil war in over a century and a half, tops the list.
If we compare the incarceration rates of individual U.S. states and territories with that of other nations, for example, we see that 32 states have incarceration rates higher than that of Turkmenistan, which is the nation with the second highest incarceration rate in the world after the United States. The U.S. State Department criticizes the human rights rights record of Turkmenistan’s “authoritarian government”, but the District of Columbia — where the U.S. State Department is based — has an incarceration rate more than twice that of Turkmenistan.
To belabor the point, this graphic shows incarceration rates among founding NATO members:
