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The International Use of Incarceration

The Sentencing Project

A 52-nation survey on the international use of incarceration shows a broad variation in the degree to which countries make use of imprisonment. The survey shows that Russia and the United States now lead all other nations, with an incarceration rate that is 5-8 times that of most industrialized nations. Although rates of violent crime in the United States are considerable higher than in other nations, this has not been the primary factor leading to the 155% increase in new court commitments since 1980 because 84% of the increase was due to drug, property, and public order offenses. Cross-national comparisons of incarceration have found that sentence length is a key variable in explaining differences in the use of incarceration and that relative punitiveness may be a function of the degree of general societal inequality.

The Prison Journal, Vol. 75, No. 1, 113-123 (1995)
DOI: 10.1177/0032855595075001006


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