The United States of Incarceration - Prison Policy Initiative

Since the 1970's, the United States has been engaged in a globally unprecedented experiment to make every part of its criminal legal system more expansive and more punitive. As a result, incarceration has become the nation’s default response to crime, where around 70 percent of convictions resulting in confinement.

Although the country makes up about five percent of the global population, it holds nearly a quarter of the world’s prisoners, making it the country with the highest rate of incarceration in the world. As of May 2024, more than five million people are under the supervision of the criminal legal system, including nearly two million people in prisons and jails, a dramatic increase from the early 1970s, when the number was 360,000.

Worse, every single state incarcerates more people per capita than most nations. In the global context, even “progressive” U.S. states like California, New York and Massachusetts appear as extreme as Louisiana and Mississippi in their use of prisons and jails.

In fact, many of the countries that rank alongside the least punitive U.S. states, such as Turkmenistan, Belarus, Russia, and Azerbaijan, have authoritarian or dictatorial governments, but the United States - the "land of the free" - still incarcerates more people per capita than almost every other nation. Importantly, when considering that studies frequently and routinely indicate that high incarceration rates have little impact on violence and crime, the many known negative effects of mass incarceration on families, communities, and overall quality of living indicators isn't worth it.

El Salvador has the highest incarceration rate in the world at 1,086 incarcerated people per 100,000. If they were independent countries, the next nine entries on this list are US States: Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Kentucky, Georgia, Tennessee, with South Dakota rounding out the top 10.

"Progressive" California, when compared to other NATO countries, incarcerates the second highest number of people per capita (494 people out of 100,000), only to be outdone by the United States as a whole (608 people out of 100,000). The next standalone country on the NATO list is the United Kingdom (144 people out of 100,000).

To read more about United States incarceration rates in a global context, visit "States of Incarceration: The Global Context 2024" at Prison Policy Initiative. You can also review the incarceration profiles from all 50 US States. Prison Policy Initiative produces cutting edge research to expose the broader harm of mass criminalization, and then sparks advocacy campaigns to create a more just society.