Comment Re:Prison (Score 1) 407
But incarceration rate per population doesn't tell you if the population is being over-incarcerated unless you know the crimes-worthy-of-incarceration rate. If America's rate of crime-worthy-of-incarceration is several times the European, then it's perfectly natural the US has a several-times-higher incarceration rate.
Now, there are all sorts of difficulties in calculating such a rate. But it doesn't seem too unreasonable to guess that, however it's calculated, the general rate of crime-worthy-of-incarceration would correlate with the homicide rate. So, let's use the homicide rate as a normalizer. How many incarcerated persons does a country have per annual intentional homicide? Using the Wikipedia numbers for prisoners and annual intentional homicides, we get:
Australia: 121
Belgium: 68
Bulgaria: 73
Canada: 74
Croatia: 90
Czech Republic: 163
Denmark: 91
Estonia: 46
Finland: 36
France: 103
Germany: 98
Greece: 71
Hungary: 142
Iceland: 157
Ireland: 74
Israel: 138
Italy: 111
Japan: 170
Latvia: 56
Lithuania: 48
Luxembourg: 164
Netherlands: 91
New Zealand: 203
Norway: 33
Poland: 175
Portugal: 115
Romania: 96
Slovakia: 134
Slovenia: 94
South Korea: 109
Spain: 180
Sweden: 86
Switzerland: 145
Taiwan: 91
UK: 147
US: 147
Thus, the US incarceration rate differential is within the normal variation seen in developed countries, after you account for the fact that the US has a lot more violent crime than other developed countries (as seen in its much higher homicide rate).