States of Incarceration: The Global Context 2018

By Peter Wagner and Wendy SawyerTweet thisJune 2018 This report is has been updated with a new version for 2024. Oklahoma now has the highest incarceration rate in the U.S., unseating Louisiana from 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. World Incarceration Rates If Every U.S. State Were A Country Rates calculated per 100,000 people. Read more about the data.Figure 1. This graph shows the number of people in state prisons, local jails, federal prisons, and other systems of confinement from each U.S. state per 100,000 people in that state and the incarceration rate per 100,000 in all countries with a total population of at least 500,000. The graphic above charts the incarceration rates of ever...