"States of Incarceration: The Global Context 2021"

The title of this post is the title of this notable new report from the Prison Policy Initiative authored by Emily Widra and Tiana Herring.  Here is part of the start of the report:

Louisiana once again has the highest incarceration rate in the U.S., unseating Oklahoma to return to its long-held position as “the world’s prison capital.”  By comparison, states like New York and Massachusetts appear progressive, but even these states lock people up at higher rates than nearly every other country on earth.  Compared to the rest of the world, every U.S. state relies too heavily on prisons and jails to respond to crime....

If we imagine every state as an independent nation ... every state appears extreme.  24 states would have the highest incarceration rate in the world — higher even than the United States.  Massachusetts, the state with the lowest incarceration rate in the nation, would rank 17th 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 Turkey, Thailand, Rwanda, and Russia, have authoritarian governments or have recently experienced large-scale internal armed conflicts. Others struggle with “violent crime” on a scale far beyond that in the U.S.: South Africa, Panama, Costa Rica, and Brazil all have murder rates more than double that of the U.S.  Yet the U.S., “the land of the free,” tops them all....

The incarceration rates in every U.S. state are out of line with the entire world, and we found that this disparity is not explainable by differences in crime or “violent crime.”  In fact, there is little correlation between high rates of “violent crime” and the rate at which the U.S. states lock people up in prisons and jails.

When we compare U.S. states and other nations in terms of both “violent crime” and incarceration, we find ourselves more closely aligned with nations with authoritarian governments or recently large-scale internal armed conflicts.  Rather than any of the founding NATO member countries traditionally compared to the United States, the only countries that approach the incarceration rate and “violent crime” rates of the 50 states are El Salvador, Panama, Peru, and Turkey.  Every U.S. state, and the United States as a nation, is an outlier in the global context.  No other country incarcerates as many people, including countries with similar rates of “violent crime.”