I wanted to give you one more quick note on the reason why some statistics only include people in prisons and others include people in both prisons and jails. Every county I think is going to have a county jail these days. In huge cities these can be huge facilities. More often then not though these are just little rinky-dink places with a few beds. Ours only has a few dozen beds. A lot have less than that. These places are run by the sheriff's departments in the respective counties. Cities will sometimes also have jails which usually just consist of one or more holding cells where people are usually kept for no more than a few hours awaiting trials or hearings in city or municipal court, or after being sentenced and before being transported to the county jails. There may be some city jails that people actually serve sentences in, I don't know. Anyway, these facilities have not always been great about keeping statistics. Now that we are in the computer age, things are a lot better than they used to be, but before computers a lot of these places were not keeping any statistical information or were at least not reporting it. Large prison systems have been keeping this data for a long time, but not little local facilities. When we look at historical incarceration rates, the only reliable data available from say thirty years back and before is for state and federal prisons. There just isn't data available before that on the numbers of people incarcerated in all the small jails run by cities and counties throughout the nation. That's the biggest reason why a lot of these statistics you will find only cover prisons but not jails.
Well, as you can see from the date stamp of this post, I haven't exactly been plugged into this thread.
Seeing as the report in your link #1 was discussing state and federal prisoners, municipal-level incarceration (of any stripe - yes, pun intended) was probably not included in the statistic quoted in my earlier post.
At best, your link #1 indicated 1 in 206 +/- (486 per 100,000) vs. 1 in 80 purported by the author of the article. The best I could calculate was 1 in 127 +/-. The author of the article is overstating incarceration rates by anywhere from 50% ((127/80) -1) to 150% ((206-80)-1)
It is incumbent on the purveyor of a statistical analysis to present his methodology so that the reader can understand the viewpoint of the purveyor, and make an informed decision.
All I am saying is give intellectual honesty (and the scientific method) a chance...If the methodology is solid, the stats will stand the harsh light of day.