[lbo-talk] Equal Justice Initiative: United States Considered Most Punitive Country in the World

[Joshua Morey]

I encountered a similar article recently and, just for fun, graphed the
incarceration rates of the 35 countries listed in the article against their
gini coefficients (imperfect, I know, but i had quick access to the #'s and,
like i said, it was just for fun...). No surprises, nothing new, not strict
science, but it returned a correlation coefficient of .628 (fairly strong) -
if curious you can view the info and the graph in google docs by following
the link below (sheet three).

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0At8GW9zr0UiLdFBxcDhCU19GTnFOZUZVUmNkSHZ2LXc&hl=en#gid=3

If nothing else, it warrants a closer, more disciplined look (which i'm sure
has been done already, just haven't looked for it yet).

best wishes,
Joshua

BTW the graph might not show up if viewed from a phone

On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 3:30 PM, Joseph Catron <jncatron at gmail.com> wrote:


> "Mass incarceration in the United States continues at record high
> levels despite outsized costs. According to recent data reported in
> The Economist, the United States has the world's highest incarceration
> rate, locking up five times more people per capita than Britain, nine
> times more than Germany, and 12 times more than Japan."
>
> http://www.eji.org/eji/node/423
>
> I don't see anything new here, but it's a useful snapshot of the
> situation. And the linked Economist article would be comic, if it
> weren't so tragic.
>
> --
> "Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure
> mægen lytlað."
>
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