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by ibsathish 4592 days ago
Certainly looks like a biased list. Look at the bottom of the list and most of them are from Africa where you'd know the crime rates are high. May be, they are not 'punishable offenses' or they get let-off easily.
2 comments

The data is objective -- surely not 100% accurate, like most data -- but only interpretations of it can be biased. There is obviously another important variable: the countries' level of development. Very poor countries have low incarceration rates because they don't have functional police and judicial systems.

But you can compare the USA to the rest of the western world: Europe, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. These countries share very similar societies, values, legal systems, forms of government and levels of economic development. With this simple filter the anomaly becomes clear and bias is harder to claim.

It's not biased. Those countries may have high crime, but they have low incarceration, which is what this page is about. The story here isn't the corruption in Africa that keeps criminals out of prison, it's the corruption in the US that puts innocents in prison.