The USA imprisons a lot of people; it has more than 700 prisoners per 100k population. As a country, its imprisonment rate is second only to Seychelles (which is a small African country comprising many islands with only 90k people). The USA has 21.7% of the global prisoner population, but only 4.4% of the total global population. So is the USA legal system too effective? Or are other countries’ systems not effective enough?

This graphic puts the issue into perspective. The area of each country’s rectangle is proportional to the total number of prisoners it has. The value for the color is normalized using each country’s population (prisoners per 100k people).

Data source: http://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison-population-total