> The US incarcerates more people than China, despite China having more than four times as many people

Homicide and incarceration rates per 100k people:

         homicide | incarceration | incarceration/homicide
  USA         6.4 |           505 |                     79
  China       0.5 |           119 |                    238
  Norway      0.6 |            55 |                     92

In other words, China incarcerates 3x as many people per homicide as the USA, and the USA homicide rate is 12.8x that of China. Homicide is used instead of/as a proxy for violent crime, because it is largely immune to bias by overpolicing or racism, which are the usual excuses to dismiss statistics. Source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...