[futurehero]

There are 2.3 million people incarcerated in America. 5000, or 0.2% of them, died in jail. A 99.8% chance of not dying in jail for those 2.3 million people is thus indicative of a society with high degree of civilization. Fyodor would call our jails health spas compared to what existed in Russia during his lifetime between 1821 and 1881.

[dragonwriter]

> 5000, or 0.2% of them, died in jail.

No, 5000 of them died in pre-trial detention. A lot more died in jail (which is a much larger set that includes most pretrial detention and a lot of other incarceration), and an even larger number died while incarcerated (an even larger set that is a superset of both of the previous ones.)

[pessimizer]

If you're going to count every incarcerated person, why not count every person in the world? There aren't 2.3 million people in jail.

> Fyodor would call our jails health spas compared to what existed in Russia during his lifetime between 1821 and 1881.

I absolutely guarantee that Russia had an order of magnitude lower proportion of incarcerated people than the US. We have a higher percentage of people in prison than any other nation on earth, double our nearest competitor.

[juniper_strong]

Wikipedia has Russia at 346 people incarcerated per 100,000 and the US at 655. El Salvador is at 590.

So, highest in the world but not anywhere nearly double the second highest, and not an order of magnitude greater than Russia.