Zakaria: Incarceration nation
excerpt Global Public Square
[Pat Robertson] He’s right. Here are the numbers: The total number of Americans under correctional supervision (prison, parole, etc.) is 7.1 million, more than the entire state of Massachusetts. Adam Gopnik writes in the New Yorker, "Over all, there are now more people under 'correctional supervision' in America. . .than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height."
No other country comes even close to our rates of incarceration.
We have 760 prisoners per 100,000 people. Most European countries have one seventh that number (per capita, so it's adjusted for population). Even those on the high end of the global spectrum - Brazil, Poland - have only a quarter the number we do.