Why does the USA have the largest prison population of any country in the world?

Question

Over 2 million out of a population of 300 million. More than China, whch has a population of 1.2 BILLION. More than India, with a population of 1 billion.

A bigger percentage than Cuba, North Korea, or Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Bigger than any Arab oil sheikdom. Bigger than zionist Israel. Bigger than Venezuela, Libya, or Chile under either Pinochet OR Allende. Bigger than South Africa, either under apartheid OR today.

Do you think that all of these people deserve to be behind bars? If so, what is it about the USA that causes its people to be criminally-inclined?

If they don't all deserve it, what is it about the USA that makes it oppress its people so much?

Why does the USA have the largest prison population of any country in the world?

And yes, a bigger percentage than Iran.

Why do YOU think the USA has the most people in prison?

Answer 1

Coz it's got the biggest Prison-Industrial-Complex. Profits must come first- ahead of rehab-detox .

Answer 2

Perhaps a better question would be based on the following statistics:
- What is the rate of incarceration "per capita"?
- What is the actual crime rate?

And you may find that the USA is not necessarily in the top spot. (They may be, but you'd have to find out.)

Also, for some of the countries you've mentioned, it may be hard to get hard facts about the crime rates there and imprisonment rates since some of them are not democracies and thus do nto have the freedom of information necessary to get an accurate picture of what goes on there.

As is the case, there is a correlation between incarceration and crime rates. Crime rates tend to go down when more criminals are incarcerated. This is partially because many serious crimes are done by repeat offenders and others are discouraged when they see others paying for their misdeeds.

Answer 3

A generation of individuals that have a decreased sense of personal responsibility. With freedom, comes responsibility. The "ME" generation is in it for themselves, drug sales/use, money, guns whatever it may be, it is all for them.

Once a new generation of responsible adults regain control over: respect, family, responsibility, honor, and integrity. And take the time to teach these qualities to there children instead of handing them off to daycare or the grandparents. Then, and only then will we see a change in prison populations. They don't put good honorable people in prison.

Answer 4

Well as for the china example, they will kill you for taking a bribe, killing that many people cuts back on housing, plus all the ones they don't tell us about, so the statistics look better.

Also we would cut our prison sizes in a huge way if we legalized things like Drugs and prostitution, not to mention we would get rid of orginized crime big time.

Answer 5

I think "open your eyes" has the United States confused with Australia.

No one has ever suggested that Pilgrims, Puritans, or other settlers came here for any reasons other then freedom from religious persecution or, later, economic development.

Australia, however, was pretty much a British prison for the worst of the worst.

Answer 6

So because you said some youtube video clips you've each and every of the solutions? you do not comprehend how uneducated you sound... they have not been brainwashed into something, they don't imagine all of us are criminals, they are not educated to ruin previous adult adult males for rushing. human beings like you're the challenge. shall we see you ***** and moan once you or a buddy is robbed and they happen to help.

Answer 7

DRUG LAWS!! I think 50% of the prison population are for drug related offenses . Most non-violent.

With freedom comes violence , unfortunatly

Answer 8

Probably because our country willingly takes the refuse from all of those countries you just mentioned. We also get some good people from those countries, but there are bound to be problems when too many people from alien cultures try to live in our culture.

Answer 9

Of course the countries that you are comparing the US to have a smaller prison population.

They kill their criminals, or chop off their hands (Shira law).

They have "other" less humane way with dealing with their criminals.

Answer 10

Your skepticism is well-placed. The U.S. certainly doesn't have the highest incarceration rate in world history, and depending on whose figures you believe may not even have the highest rate now. However, to be honest, we're more competitive than you might care to hear.

According to the International Centre for Prison Studies at King's College London, the U.S. currently has the largest documented prison population in the world, both in absolute and proportional terms. We've got roughly 2.03 million people behind bars, or 701 per 100,000 population. China has the second-largest number of prisoners (1.51 million, for a rate of 117 per 100,000), and Russia has the second-highest rate (606 per 100,000, for a total of 865,000). Russia had the highest rate for years, but has released hundreds of thousands of prisoners since 1998; meanwhile the U.S. prison population has grown by even more. Rounding out the top ten, with rates from 554 to 437, are Belarus, Bermuda (UK), Kazakhstan, the Virgin Islands (U.S.), the Cayman Islands (UK), Turkmenistan, Belize, and Suriname, which you'll have to agree puts America in interesting company. South Africa, a longtime star performer on the list, has dropped to 15th place (402) since the dismantling of apartheid.

I'm not aware of any attempt to systematically compare imprisonment rates for all the world's sovereign states throughout history, and compiling such a list would be a daunting task. (Fax me those Sumerian jail records, would you?) But Stalin's Soviet Union, with its huge network of forced-labor camps, would surely be near the top. I've seen widely varying figures, but let's use the conservative Britannica number of five million prisoners in the Gulag in 1936. That works out to more than 3,000 per 100,000. The record holder, though, is undoubtedly Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge: the regime forced virtually the entire population into labor camps or prisons during the late 1970s, killing as many as two million of the country's six to seven million people.

Nazi Germany employed millions of slave laborers, but most were foreign nationals during wartime, so the comparison doesn't seem apt. China, though . . . well, 1.5 million prisoners is just the official figure. Chinese human rights activist Harry Wu, who spent 19 years in forced-labor camps for criticizing the government, estimates that 16 to 20 million of his countrymen are incarcerated, including common criminals, political prisoners, and people in involuntary job placements. Even ten million prisoners would make for a rate of 793 per 100,000.

Another nation suspected to have a lot of prisoners is North Korea. The country isn't listed in ICPS statistics, but a recent NBC News investigation put the number of political prisoners alone at 200,000, or more than 900 per 100,000.

Great, you're thinking. The only countries that might put away more of their own people than we do are both notorious authoritarian states. No question: considering we're supposed to be the land of the free, we've got a huge number of folks locked up. Most countries, including almost all our industrialized peers, have imprisonment rates under 200. India, hardly an orderly utopia, has a rate of just 29. What gives? You can try to explain our prison boom by pointing to political gambits like mandatory sentencing laws and the war on drugs, but that's dodging the question: Is crime here really that much worse than everywhere else?

Not necessarily. A comparison with the UK (incarceration rate for England and Wales: 140) is instructive. According to a U.S. Department of Justice report, rates for many types of serious crime are similar in the U.S. and UK, but between 1981 and 1996 they dropped here and rose there. Rates of burglary, assault, and car theft are now higher in Britain. Murder and rape are still vastly higher here, but the gap has narrowed. American law-and-order advocates will say: Of course! We put more of our bad guys in jail! Defenders of civil liberties, on the other hand, tend to see the get-tough approach as a way of putting the screws to minorities, whose chances of getting sent up the river--even for minor offenses like marijuana possession--are disproportionately high. Do more convicts = less crime? A knotty question, but luckily for me not the one you asked.