More shocking prison statistics following the Pew Research report I blogged about last week. An article in the New York Times (via Brijit) focuses more on the US incarceration rate compared to the rest of the world.

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London.

Earlier this week Thomas Purves pointed to research by Eric Cadora showing, on a map of Broooklyn, how much money is spent to incarcerate residents of particular city blocks. This is mildly interesting from a statistical point of view, but when compared to the same map showing Black population by block it becomes shocking. The intent of the map was to show how certain voting districts lose a great deal of their democratic weight to prison, but the racial implications of those results are shameful.

[tags]united states, imprisonment, incarceration, thomas purves, eric cadora[/tags]