United States incarceration rate

Common card · No. 270606

According to the World Prison Brief (WPB) the United States had the world's highest incarceration rate from 2001 (when the US overtook Russia) through October 4, 2022 (US rate of 629 per 100,000 population at that time). That was except for periods when the Seychelles (population around 121,000) had the highest rate. According to the WPB as of September 3, 2025 the United States had the fifth highest incarceration rate in the world, at 541 per 100,000 population, using the latest available solid US numbers (2022) from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Between 2019 and 2020, the United States saw a significant drop in the total number of incarcerations. State and federal prison, and local jail, incarcerations dropped from 2.1 million in 2019 to 1.7 million in 2020. The US incarceration total has risen since 2020. See the Bureau of Justice Statistics timeline table to the right below the map. As of their March 2023 publication, the Prison Policy Initiative, a non-profit organization for...

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