The country with smaller number of prisoners by general population is Burkina Ditch, with 23 by each 100,000 inhabitants. The one that more, with overwhelming difference, the United States, with 738. In absolute terms, the country with less secluded population is Iceland, with 119 people in its jails and the one that more, the United States again, with more than two million. Practically the totality of the European countries is placed below 150 prisoners by each 100 thousand inhabitants, many of them with less than 100. In Latin America they are between 100 and 200. In other continents there is some exotic case like Rwanda, by the civil massacre of 1994, with almost 700 interns and countries of the old Soviet orbit like the same Russia, Bielorrusia or Turkmenistan, that are between 400 and 600.
In short, 80% of the countries of the world, independent of their political regime, their size or its geographic area, have a secluded population inferior to 200 prisoners by each 100,000 inhabitants. For that reason it is strange to us and it troubles that rare one to us statistic elaborated by the Program of United Nations for the Development (the PNUD), that locates at the top to autonombrada the first democracy of the world. Twenty-five years ago, the United States had numbers of imprisonment in syntony with the world-wide averages. The adopted penitentiary model in these three last decades has changed progressively. A worrisome model by the risk that it has to be emulated universally, like so many other aspects of the North American life.
The numbers of criminality have not suffered of form compares any reduction as far as number of committed crimes. On the contrary, they have been increased substantially in parcels as the drug traffic and consumption. The sensation of insecurity by many reasons, including the terrorism, has been growing and nowadays the Americans feel like less insurances than ever by very diverse and complex reasons.