States of Incarceration: The Global Context 2024

by Emily Widra

The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any independent democracy on earth — worse, every single state incarcerates more people per capita than most nations. In the global context, even “progressive” U.S. states like New York and Massachusetts appear as extreme as Louisiana and Mississippi in their use of prisons and jails.

The graphic above charts the incarceration rates of every U.S. state and territory alongside those of the other nations of the world. Looking at each state in the global context reveals that, in every part of the country, incarceration is out of step with the rest of the world.

If we imagine every state as an independent nation, as in the graph above, every state appears extreme. While El Salvador has an incarceration rate higher than any U.S. state, nine states have the next highest incarceration rates in the world, followed by Cuba. Overall, 25 U.S. states and three nations (El Salvador, Cuba, and Rwanda) have incarceration rates even higher than the national incarceration rate of the United States. Massachusetts, the state with the lowest incarceration rate in the nation, would rank 30th in the world with an incarceration rate higher than Iran, Colombia, and all the founding NATO nations.

In fact, many of the countries that rank alongside the least punitive U.S. states, such as Turkmenistan, Belarus, Russia, and Azerbaijan, have authoritarian or dictatorial governments, but the U.S. — the land of the free — still incarcerates more people per capita than almost every other nation. Importantly, high incarceration rates have little impact on violence and crime.

But how do the nation and all 50 states compare in the global context? Next to our closest international peers, our use of incarceration is off the charts:

Conclusion

For decades, the U.S. has been engaged in a globally unprecedented experiment to make every part of its criminal legal system more expansive and more punitive. As a result, incarceration has become the nation’s default response to crime, with, for example, 70 percent of convictions resulting in confinement — far more than other developed nations with comparable crime rates. As we’ve discussed, the U.S.’ high incarceration rates are not a rational response to high crime rates. Instead, they represent the aftermath of racist policies like the “war on drugs,” as well as politically expedient responses to public fears and perceptions about crime and violence.

Today, the United States is at an inflection point. In 2020, after protests of the murder of George Floyd, some glimmers of hope emerged that the country was finally ready to end the failed experiment of mass incarceration. However, more recently, many public officials have called for a return to the harmful policies of the past. The choices made in the coming years will determine whether the United States will finally bring its incarceration rate in line with the other nations that it considers its peers. For that, all states will have to aim higher, striving to be not just better than the worst U.S. states, but among the most fair and just in the world.

***

For more information, including our full interactive chart, visualizations for all 50 states, our methodology, and footnotes, see the full version of this report on our website.