Countries with the Most Prisoners

Not necessarily, if it is day-time in Tokyo.

There's also more of me than there are penguins on Mars!

That's what you think P3nguin 😳

Three grammatical errors in one sentence should be a jail-able offense.

It's just an unimaginative joke

Australia was founded and settled by British convicts.

Saying it was 'founded' by British convicts implies they chose to go there of their own volition. It was the British Government that sent them there.

@comjag Australia was not founded by British convicts. Also, there were British settlers who were not convicts.

:O

Granted, this should be per capita, but US is still number one. From a BBC report: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/uk/06/prisons/html/nn2page1.stm

Quote from the source: "The Deputy Procurator-General of the Supreme People's Procuratorate reported in 2009 that, in addition to the sentenced prisoners, more than 650,000 were held in detention centres In China; if this was still correct in 2018 the total prison population in China was at least 2,360,000. In addition, it is widely reported that about a million Uighur Muslims are detained in camps in Xinjiang province; no reliable figures are available."

While even if you include Uighurs and political prisoners, China's numbers won't be close to America's per-capita, it's worth pointing out that the numbers for China are probably higher than they appear.

I think that "functioning" might be too strong of a word for the US criminal justice system. Granted, other countries have it worse. There are places where the justice system is more corrupt, more inept, more oppressive and less fair. And there are places where there just isn't a justice system or isn't much of one that are close to being lawless. But the US system still completely sucks. For many different reasons. and the US prison population is still ridiculously high, a lot of which has to do with the misguided and poorly implemented "war on drugs."

Do you think it's also a myth that a for-profit prison system incentivizes harsher than needed sentencing and denials of deserved paroles? And what about the effectiveness of the penal system as a tool for rehabilitation?

Having been through the justice system myself before (for some pretty petty crap, and more than once when I was innocent), and screwed over royally each time by kangaroo courts that don't seem to give a crap about justice but only care about conviction rates and squeezing money out of people to pay for themselves, I might have a less rosy picture of the whole thing than most. I've also worked along side cops before. Most were scumbags. The good ones drop out or they get beaten down by the system until they lose their ideals and become a part of said system. Same goes for judges. The whole system is focused on the wrong things and aimed in the wrong direction.

And.. yes, drugs ought to be legalized. And I say this as someone who has never used any.

I think that "active" might be a better term than "functioning".

That's all I have to say about this.

I'm looking at the pie chart you linked to QM and I think jmellor still has a point. The stat that's often thrown out there about drug offenders can be considered misleading because it only includes people in federal prison, where you've got 180,000 people locked up for non-violent crimes (more than half for drugs) and a measly 14,000 for violent crimes. It's easy to find fault with this because local jails and state prisons make up a much bigger piece of the pie than federal prisons. However, even at the state level barely half of all prisoners are there for violent crimes. And you've got 46,000 people locked up for drug possession- I know it's not a huge percentage of the total but that's still a travesty.

A weekend in county jail is not the same as maximum security with lifers.

According to their profile, Oozy is from the UK. Plus, I think they were making a (tired) joke.

I took a look at the percentages because absolute numbers don't take population size into account. Of course the numbers are a mix of how effective a legal system is on the one hand and how corrupt or unjust it is on the other, as well as reporting bias. With this in mind, El Salvador is clearly in the lead with almost 2% of its population in prison - I think they did some major crackdowns on organized crime recently. Second place is already the US with 0,5% of its population in prison. Insane, I didn't know it was that bad. Next are Turkey, Brazil and Thailand with about 0,4% each, followed by Russia, Argentina and Morrocco with about 0,3%.

India comes in last (which is a good thing I guess) with only 0,04% of its population in prison.