You knew this already, but here is a good summary:
According to a 2005 report … the United States—with five percent of the world’s population—houses 25 percent of the world’s inmates. Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). Other industrial countries, even those with significant crime problems of their own, are much less punitive: our incarceration rate is 6.2 times that of Canada, 7.8 times that of France, and 12.3 times that of Japan. We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate emp[loyers in the country, and we are spending some $200 billion annually on law enforcement and correction at all levels of government, a fourefold increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century. . . .
Source: that’s Glen Loury, here, as quoted in Timothy Taylor, Recommendations for Further Reading, 21 Journal of Economic Perspectives No. 4, 229, 230 (Fall 2007). Couple that with Jon Markman’s estimate that the share of our work force in the, ahem, “security industry” is 25 percent. Wonder how to analyze this in terms of the fact that the U.S. also accounts for 48 percent of all world military spending…
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