I don’t often just reproduce someone else’s post verbatim, but I just surfed over to the Virtual Stoa where “Chris has”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2005_11_01_archive.html#113096578158707788 the following from the “US Department of Justice”:http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/press/ppus04pr.htm

bq. ALMOST 7 MILLION ADULTS UNDER CORRECTIONAL SUPERVISION BEHIND BARS OR ON PROBATION OR PAROLE IN THE COMMUNITY

bq. WASHINGTON, D.C. — The number of adults in prison, jail, or on probation or parole reached almost 7 million during 2004, the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) announced today. The number has grown by more than 1.6 million adults under correctional authority control since 1995.

bq. The nation’s total correctional population was 6,996,500 in 2004, of which 4,151,125 were living in the community on probation; 1,421,911 were in a state or federal prison; 765,355 were living in the community on parole; and 713,990 were in jail, according to the BJS report on probation and parole. At year-end one in every 31 adults were under correctional supervision, which was 3.2 percent of the U.S. adult population…

As Chris says, wow.

Surfing over to “Nationmaster”:http://www.nationmaster.com/index.php — which uses the stats for 2003 and so has slightly fewer actual prisoners — I see that the US also has the highest absolute number of prisoners in the world (more than China!) , and the highest number per capita (715 per 100k). For comparison, the higher number per capita in the EU is 210 per 100k (Poland) and 144 for “older” Europe (Spain). For some reason the UK isn’t listed, but I think the figure works out at about 125.