The Top 5 Countries With the Highest Number of Criminally Prosecuted Adults

1. The United States incarcerates the largest number of people in the world. The U.S. incarceration rate is four times the world average.
2. Some individual US states imprison up to six times as many people as do nations of comparable population ad well, the US imprisons the most women in the world. The number of women sentenced to prison in China in 2003 was 71,280, while the number of women sentenced to a year or more in prison in the US was 92,785. The rate of imprisonment of women in China is approximately one-fifth that of the US.
3. The United States has less than 5% of the world’s population but over 23% of the world’s incarcerated people.
4. Compared to the world's other most populous countries, the 2.2 million people incarcerated in the US in 2006 was 153% higher than Russia, 505% higher than Brazil, 550% higher than India, and over 2,000% higher than Indonesia, Bangladesh, or Nigeria
5. US rates are in large part driven by disproportionate minority incarceration. If the rest of the world followed the US lead on incarceration policies and practices, the total number incarcerated worldwide would increase fivefold from 9.2 million to 47.6 million.

Top 5 facts sources: Research from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency Fact sheet, November 2006.