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20% of the worlds prison population
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2025
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I thought the states were being compared to other countries. Didn't look properly on the phone.
They are, and I agree it's misleading. It's implying that it's somehow shocking that the individual states of the county with the highest incarceration rate in the world also have a high incarceration rate. If it was absolute numbers, it would maybe make a point. As it is, it's stating the extremely obvious and framing it as "look, it's even worse than you thought".
If you have a population with 10M people and 20,000 of them are prisoners, that's significantly less concerning than a country with 100,000 people of which 10,000 are prisoners. You can't make an apples-to-apples comparison between Texas and Wyoming with raw head-count.
It's shocking that the state of Louisiana has a full 2% of its population in jail. That's twice the US national baseline.
Wait... isn't ~1,000 per 100,000 much closer to 1% than 2%?
It's still mind boggling, not trying to minimize it.