So I just flipped to a random page in my Top 10 List of Everything book and landed on this one: Top 10 Countries with the Highest Prison Populations. I thought this might be an interesting one to blog about tonight. As usual, I’m going to make my guesses before looking at the answer. I’m going to say the United States, China and maybe Russia will be the top three. This might be an easy one to guess as it probably correlates pretty closely with the countries with the highest populations in general. But, that being the case, you might think India could be up there. But somehow I’m thinking India doesn’t have as many criminals as the U.S. or Russia. I could be wrong. So here’s the list ranked by total prisoners. The second number is prisoners per 100,000.
- USA, 737, 2,193,798
- China, 118, 1,548,498
- Russia, 613, 871,693
- Brazil, 203, 385,317
- India, 30, 332,112
- Mexico, 197, 214,452
- Thailand, 256, 164,443
- Ukraine 350, 162,602
- South Africa, 336, 160,198
- Iran, 214, 147,926
Wow, I was pretty close with getting the top three correct and indeed, India showed up in the top 5 after all. But take a look at the prisoners per 100,000 of population. A list ranked on this number would have India way down near the bottom with only 30 in 100k. Of course we would still lead in this ranking with a whooping 737 per 100k.
So what does this say about the United States? Do we proportionately have four times as many criminals as Mexico and seven times as many as China? Are we that bad or do we simply have a better judicial system that holds people more accountable? I guess that would be debatable, but I’d say it’s a combination of both.
Source: International Centre for Prison Studies. Posted by the science toy guy for the best selling toys of 2008.
