U.S. Tops in World Prison Population Ranking!

[WSJ_law_blog]

Well, yeah, so the news is in from Copenhagen: Chicago placed fourth out of the four finalists to host the 2016 Summer Olympics — behind Tokyo, Madrid and the winner, Rio de Janeiro. (Let’s go out on a limb here and anoint Brazil the favorites to bring home the gold in soccer that year).

Here’s our take: Brazil can go ahead and have its little fancy-dancy seaside Olympic party seven years from now, but what they can’t do is top us in this year’s World Prison Population Ranking!

That’s right. The ranking, put out by the King’s College London International Centre for Prison Studies, found that in the U.S. 756 out of every 100,000 is incarcerated.

According to the study:

The United States has the highest prison population rate in the world, 756 per 100,000 of the national population, followed by Russia (629), Rwanda (604), St Kitts & Nevis (588), Cuba (c.531), U.S. Virgin Is. (512), British Virgin Is. (488), Palau (478), Belarus (468), Belize (455), Bahamas (422), Georgia (415), American Samoa (410), Grenada (408) and Anguilla (401).

A blog about the Texas criminal justice system, called Grits for Breakfast, takes the ranking a step further and examines just where the Lone Star state would rank were it a separate country. Writes GFB’s Scott Henson:

Of course, even though Texas’ incarceration rate has been recently declining, our rate still tops the US national rate by a wide margin, which makes Texas arguably the global incarceration leader. At last count, Texas prisons incarcerated more than 1,000 prisoners per every 100,000 residents. About one out of every 22 adult Texans is in prison, in jail, on probation or on parole compared to one out of 31 nationally.

Putting Texas aside for a moment, what do we make of the ranking of nations? On the one hand, one might make an argument that something is deeply wrong in the U.S. — either with the criminal-justice system or with our society more broadly — that leads to so much incarceration. On the other, folks could argue that we’re just better at nabbing our criminals, that our vigilance is perhaps a sign that we’re just more on top of things, more civilized.

We placed a call to Douglas Berman, the Ohio State law professor who runs the very fine Sentencing Law and Policy blog, to ask for help on making sense of the numbers.

Berman sees the statistics as, in a word, ironic. “The chest-pounding about freedom and liberty that so many of our leaders do, both on the left and the right seems inconsistent with this statistical anomaly,” he says. “We live in a country conceived on the notion of liberty, but we lead the world in locking people up.”

Fair enough. But we asked Berman if whether our high incarceration rate was possibly a sign that we’re providing better — and more free — livelihoods for those of us who aren’t incarcerated.

Berman wasn’t biting.

“My response to that is simple,” he said. “If that were true, we wouldn’t have so many people locked up in cages for doing things that would seem to be liberty-engaged.” For instance, Berman pointed to the so-called war on drugs. “If everyone locked in the cage simply because they smoked weed or injected him or herself with a drug, we wouldn’t be the world’s leader. A true commitment to freedom and liberty simply wouldn’t allow what we have.”

LBers, thoughts?

isn't that great?