Inmate Count in U.S. Options

[brooklyneast05]

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.)

San Marino, with a population of about 30,000, is at the end of the long list of 218 countries compiled by the center. It has a single prisoner.

The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)

The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England’s rate is 151; Germany’s is 88; and Japan’s is 63.

The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.

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i knew we were ahead of everyone else but i didn't realize by how much =/

[Elba]

Wesley Snipes just got sentenced to 3 years for tax evasion. That's f**king ridiculous.

[jesusisthebestth...]

Wesley Snipes just got sentenced to 3 years for tax evasion. That's f**king ridiculous.

You think? Part of me says, it is unreasonable, but it pisses me off that some people don't think they have to follow the rules.
And...
What about all the inmates who have become soldiers? Msn.com had an article about how the military has allowed some people who've committed serious crimes, such as larceny, to become soldiers.

Why all the crime? Are people in the US suffering so badly that they feel the need to commit crimes? What's really going on here?