This is required reading for those people striving to reform the correctional system in the United States, criminology students, or anyone concerned with issues related to confinement. The focal point of this website is an excellent graphic illustrating how the incarceration rates for each individual U.S. state compare to those rates belonging to a wide range of nations (having total populations of at least 500,000 individuals). It definitively shows that the use of incarceration by individual states dwarfs the utilization of imprisonment around the world. "If we compare the incarceration rates of individual U.S. states and territories with that of other nations, for example, we see that 36 states and the District of Columbia have incarceration rates higher than that of Cuba, which is the nation with the second highest incarceration rate in the world ... The two U.S. states that incarcerate the least are Maine and Vermont, but even those two states incarcerate far more than the United States' closest allies."
