Prison Policy Initiative reports on “States of Incarceration: The Global Context 2024”

The Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) today released this new report titled “States of Incarceration: The Global Context 2024.” Like many PPI reports, the data and graphics tell a husge part of the story and must be reviewed in the original. Here I will just reprint part of the starting text:

The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any independent democracy on earth — worse, every single state incarcerates more people per capita than most nations.  In the global context, even “progressive” U.S. states like New York and Massachusetts appear as extreme as Louisiana and Mississippi in their use of prisons and jails.

The graphic above charts the incarceration rates of every U.S. state and territory alongside those of the other nations of the world.  Looking at each state in the global context reveals that, in every part of the country, incarceration is out of step with the rest of the world.

If we imagine every state as an independent nation, as in the graph above, every state appears extreme.  While El Salvador has an incarceration rate higher than any U.S. state, nine states have the next highest incarceration rates in the world, followed by Cuba.  Overall, 25 U.S. states and three nations (El Salvador, Cuba, and Rwanda) have incarceration rates even higher than the national incarceration rate of the United States. Massachusetts, the state with the lowest incarceration rate in the nation, would rank 30th in the world with an incarceration rate higher than Iran, Colombia, and all the founding NATO nations.

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 U.S. — the land of the free — still incarcerates more people per capita than almost every other nation. Importantly, high incarceration rates have little impact on violence and crime.