"The U.S. incarcerates nearly 2.4 million people,13 including people held pretrial and those sentenced for an offense; if they were all in one state, it would be the 36th most populated, between New Mexico and Nevada.14 No other country in the world incarcerates as many people as the United States. China, a country of 1.3 billion people—about four times as many people as the U.S.15—is second, incarcerating 1.6 million people.16
Source
Petteruti, Amanda and Fenster, Jason, "Finding Direction: Expanding Criminal Justice Options by Considering Policies of Other Nations," Justice Policy Institute (Washington, DC: April 2011), p. 10-11.
http://www.justicepolicy.org/…
