Which country has the most prisoners?

[dancing-loon]

Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.
The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London.
China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China’s extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.)
Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.
The nation’s relatively high violent crime rate, partly driven by the much easier availability of guns here, helps explain the number of people in American prisons.
Read more here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/us...3 &ei=5087%0A
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If interested, here is a link with Canada's crime statistics.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2007/07/18/crime-stats.html

 

[Avro]

The crazy war on drugs accounts for many of those prisoners, locking up some dude because he smoked a joint....rediculous.

However, prisons are now a big buisness in the U.S. so I imagine politicians are lobbied to maintain the status quo.

 

[mt_pockets1000]

I recently took a training course in VESDA smoke detection systems and the rep came in from Washington state. He noted that this system was installed in a lot of prisons because of it's ability to deter vandals. He went on to say that new prisons are being built in the U.S. at an increasing rate. So much so that his business is booming. Remembering our discussions on CC I asked him why the increase in prisons throughout his country. His response: a shrug of the shoulders and a statement that went something like this..."there are a lot of sexual deviants out there". Huh? Are there that many perverts on the loose? Perhaps a castration program might be a cheaper way to go.

There's no doubt the U.S. is building more prisons, and a lot of them. I'm thinkin' Mr. VESDA rep is not getting the bigger picture.

 

[eh1eh]

On December 31, 2006 —
– 2,258,983 prisoners were held in Federal or State prisons or in local jails – an increase of 2.9% from yearend 2005, less than the average annual growth of 3.4% since yearend 1995.
– 1,502,179 sentenced prisoners were under State or Federal jurisdiction. – there were an estimated 501 sentenced prisoners per 100,000 U.S. residents – up from 411 at yearend 1995. – the number of women under the jurisdiction of State or Federal prison authorities increased 4.5% from yearend 2005, reaching 112,498, and the number of men rose 2.7%, totaling 1,458,363.
Just a few tidbits for the topic.

Source

 

[YoungJoonKim]

don't mess with America...lol

 

[dancing-loon]

All the detainees are also US prisoners!!! Let's not forget them!

And then there are the "Secret Prisons", also called "Black Holes"!

Here is a comprehensive site about....Extraordinary rendition by the United States

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition

Excerpt....
UN report by Manfred Nowak

Manfred Nowak, a special reporter on torture, has catalogued in a 15-page U.N. report presented to the 191-member General Assembly that the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Sweden and Kyrgyzstan are violating international human rights conventions by deporting terrorist suspects to countries such as Egypt, Syria, Algeria and Uzbekistan, where they may have been tortured.[86]
"The United States is holding at least 26 persons as “ghost detainees” at undisclosed locations outside of the United States," Human Rights Watch said on December 1, 2005, as it released a list naming some of the detainees. The detainees are being held indefinitely and incommunicado, without legal rights or access to counsel.
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Then there are any number of detainees in various prisons, as evidenced here....

"The ICRC has been visiting detainees in Bagram and Kandahar, Guantanamo Bay, and in Charleston. The ICRC has also repeatedly appealed to the American authorities for access to people detained in undisclosed locations."

 

[MikeyDB]

Americans have long celebrated the birth of their nation under the aegis of revolution and war. Similarly American history chronicles the "Wild West" and has devoted a great deal of energy time and money in re-creating the legends of gunfights, indian massacres, civil wars, hired-guns, the whole tapestry of lawlessness that represents one of the building blocks as foundation of a great nation.

Stories from Chicago, New York, Las Vegas, Philly, virtually any concentration of Americans on the North American continent are revisited in cinema and literature recounting the illegal whiskey trade, the drug trade, the prostitution and crime of all calibers and varieties that went along with gangsterism and saw the lawlessness of the American people tranform a savage and hostile land.

The epitome of "Americanism" is exemplified through the 'cowboy' and the 'gangster', people who believed that the "law" was something that concerned someone else, that rules of behavior were simply obstacles to be over-come. An attitude entirely commensurate with the highest American "ideal", the right of the individual to pursue happiness and be the master of his personal interface with existence.

When you cultivate an attitude that honors lawlessness and raises the rights of the individual above that of every other member of the society in which you live, you have to ultimately end up with a foundation that regards "lawlessness" as a noble expression of the fully self-actualized human being.

This notion that laws are flexible and "agreements" and contracts "subject to modification" apply only to those people and organizations wielding the power to coerce others to conformity to that standard and establishes that international laws, "conventions" and "principles" are instruments of the weak and the loathsome.

No one should be surprised that a nation that has practiced and still practices a form of slavery has many many people in prison. No one should be surprised that a society and a culture that rewards the 'outlaw' the 'radical' the stalwart independent thinker...whether that thought is actualized as theft and violence or not... and causes ruin and disaster for many other people...like corruption in the office towers of Exxon and Enron, like the preparedness to facilitate sweat-shop economics like the attitude that what an "American" thinks is "right" and "true" trumps anyone and everyone else's take on whether it's prudent to invade a nation on the basis of lies and falsehoods, whether its appropriate for the wealthy of America to demonize the poor and the suffering of other nations...

There is no limit to the capacity for lawlessness and crime that Americans are prepared to support and embrace as self-expression....while all the time of course referring to themselves' as a nation of people subscribing to the "rule of law".

No surprises here.

 

[Praxius]

And some in the States complain about China and their oppression? China has quite the large population so their stats in just about anything would be much higher then most other countries, plus they're Communist..... What's the US's excuse?

Different name, still the same thing.

 

[Blackleaf]

Britain has the largest prison population in Western Europe and is also far more likely to jail women and children than its European neighbours (the age of criminal responsibily in England & Wales is 10, and in Scotland it's just 8 ).

Britain also has more people serving life sentences - including those who will ACTUALLY spend the rest of their lives in jail - than all the other countries of Western Europe combined.

 

[Zzarchov]

The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars,
China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China’s extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.)

China also leads the world in excecutions, no one knows exactly how many. But its easy to reduce the number imprisoned at any given time if you just shoot them.