Comment by SideQuark
12 days ago
The US, with around 4% of world population, has around 25% of the worlds prisoners, vastly higher in total and percentage wise than China.
12 days ago
The US, with around 4% of world population, has around 25% of the worlds prisoners, vastly higher in total and percentage wise than China.
It would not be higher in total if you included the estimated number of Uyghurs detained in internment camps. Even considering that, there are a couple other factors that don't make the numbers you presented mean much.
One factor is that the U.S. is the 3rd largest by population and will always skew higher in total prisoners than many other countries.
The other factor which explains the relatively high incarceration rate within the country's population is the investment into policing and reporting. We can take a city like Shanghai for example. They had a population size of around ~24m+ in ~2018-2019 [1] but only had 50k cops [2] (I couldn't find citable numbers for today but the data isn't too outdated). New York City, in comparison, has a current current population size of around ~8m [3] with 33k cops [4].
The 2 countries bigger than the U.S., India and China, also historically have had less investment in law enforcement, especially in rural areas [5][6].
[1] https://tjj.sh.gov.cn/tjnj/nj19.htm?d1=2019tjnje/E0201.htm
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Municipal_Public_Secu...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City
[4] https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/about/about-nypd/about-nypd-la...
[5] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3215865/chi...
[6] https://villagesquare.in/rural-crime-and-policing-in-indias-...