this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2025
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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.