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What blew my mind is that ~667/100000 or ~.67% of Americans are incarcerated according to the numbers in this post and the population according to the German Wiki page for the US. Wikipedia says it's .531% on the English language website, .629% on the German site. (Don't know which year for either or if juvenile detention is counted on German site.) That is A LOT! A LOT!

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The last time this topic came up on HN (not that long ago, a matter of weeks), I dove into the rabbit hole a bit. Turns out that the lion's share of the difference in incarceration rates between the US and other countries comes down to sentencing. Crime-for-crime, the US doles out a lot more time than e.g. Western European nations.

A lot of people think it's drug crimes. Not really. Just the same old crimes as everywhere else, punished with 2-3x the amount of time.

This is basically what US voters have asked for up until recently. Being tough on crime is a feature for a politician. Three-strikes laws, etc.

It's largely a function of the much higher rate of violent crime in the United States

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