this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2025
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World Incarceration Rates If Every U.S. State Were A Country
It's too hilarious it can't be intentional that the top country not America is El Salvador which is where you're questionably sending all your black and brown people.
Nothing more American than privatizing and off-shoring our concentration camps.
I went to business school in the US about a decade ago (stayed full time engineer and happy about it) and I can absolutely see business schools unironically studying the process of privatizing and offshoring prisons as it relates to other more ethical and humane enterprises.
Preach
LOL just calculated for my country and we're at 100 per 100000
Worthwhile note to people too lazy to click on the link is that this is the 2021 version. In June 2024 (which is linked at the top of the linked article) the numbers look a little different but not much better for the US.
Interesting how it's southern states at the top eh?
Can't have anything to do with the fact that the US legally allows prisoner slavery right?
Winder what the race ratio of the prison population is.
This is the country routinely accusing other countries of having "prison camps."
Legit amazed California wasn't higher on the list. They've been doing mass-incarceration at an industrial scale since the 70s. But I guess the population is big enough that the per-capita statistics work out.
States like Alabama, Louisiana, and Oklahoma have such small and anemic populations and dedicate so much of their domestic budget to incarceration that they're basically giant publicly subsidized slave plantations.
Isn't that graph a bit misleading
In what way is it misleading? It seems straightforward to me.
I thought the states were being compared to other countries. Didn't look properly on the phone.
They are. Just ALL the states are significantly worse than most countries.
Yes but that doesn't really say much. We know it's bad in the US. If all German states were bad that would still only tell you that in average it's bad in Germany
not really. the fact that Louisiana has nearly double the rate of Oregon is significant. so is the fact that ~~racist~~ southern states are at the top and are the ones beating the us average.
Even if, I think it's still a valid comparison as it's a rate.
They are, and I agree it's misleading. It's implying that it's somehow shocking that the individual states of the county with the highest incarceration rate in the world also have a high incarceration rate. If it was absolute numbers, it would maybe make a point. As it is, it's stating the extremely obvious and framing it as "look, it's even worse than you thought".
It shows which US states contribute more to the US incarceration rate and clearly shows that even those that contribute the least are above the majority of the nations' incarceration rates. The latter is not obvious without visualizing the data in this way.
If you have a population with 10M people and 20,000 of them are prisoners, that's significantly less concerning than a country with 100,000 people of which 10,000 are prisoners. You can't make an apples-to-apples comparison between Texas and Wyoming with raw head-count.
It's shocking that the state of Louisiana has a full 2% of its population in jail. That's twice the US national baseline.
Wait... isn't ~1,000 per 100,000 much closer to 1% than 2%?
It's still mind boggling, not trying to minimize it.
Yes, but that is not how the graph is framed. It's framed as "look, if we put US states on a graph with other countries, they have such a high incarceration rate that there are almost no countries even on the graph!"
If it was honest and just trying to compare the incarceration rate of US states amongst each other (and the national average) it wouldn't be titled "[...] in U.S. states and all countries [...]". It's a clearly manipulative title.
The reason that a graph with this title could maybe make a point if it was absolute numbers is that most U.S. states' population is less than most countries, so if individual states were still high on such a graph, that would be shocking.
It's certainly possible that you have one big state with a high incarceration rate - Texas or California for instance - that's throwing off the national average. States are free to set their own penal process. It's not a given that every state has a globe-shattering incarceration rate.
Saying "It's not just one or two states with astronomical incarceration rates, its the whole country contributing to the total" indicates something notable about the politics and culture of the country as a whole.
Wyoming could have an incarceration rate of 0% without affecting America's position as a carceral state. That it doesn't is meaningful.
Yes, but that doesn't make the comparison to all countries with over 500 000 people meaningful. It's specifically that part that seems dishonest to me.
Though I suppose it is also possible that the full data has a few states where incarceration rates are more around the global average, which then would actually have a point in including other countries. Those weren't part of the image posted here though (which was also dropped without context as to why it was posted)
Edit: yknow it occured to me i could click the link and yea, some states are indeed more normal, though still kinda high. That's really the interesting part far more than the top of the list.
Fair enough. Any state with less than 500k people probably shouldn't be on the list.
Thank you that's what I meant, I just couldn't put it into words properly.
How is a per-capita incarceration rate, with a reference to the superset included directly on the plot, misleading? Other than including more than El Salvador for the sake of external reference, which is almost certainly a size issue.
I thought the states were being compared to other countries. Didn't look properly on the phone.
They are (which is the point) the countries are in orange USA (as an overall average) and el Salvador are the only countries that make it on to the list.
They are! The other countries are so far down on the graph they are not visible
Well yes because the US as a whole has a high number. If you added cities they would have even more in the high numbers. What's the point about that?
Because US states have populations and areas comparable to other countries. Just the US topping the charts is expected. How many states you have to get through to see other countries is interesting.
See? This makes it look like it's as misleading as I said. This is prisoners per 100.000, that means it doesn't matter how populous a state or country is. That's exactly why comparing states with countries is misleading. For every state that has a higher number than the US average there's states that have a lower number.
You cannot directly compare two populations without accounting for differences in size. Doing otherwise is very bad data science. That's why it's per 100,000 and thus takes size out of the equation. Which is good. That's a confounding factor that is trivial to deal with. Given my previous observation that many US states have populations directly comparable to other countries, the "comparing states with countries" complaint goes from vaguely plausible to inane immediately.
Thank you for defining how averages work?
Source: data engineer
Thats why they aren't just comparing each state just to the US average but to other countries.
There are 35/50 states on the graph, with 34 of them above the 2nd highest country (el Salvador).
This shows that even the US states that are lower than average are still higher than other countries.