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Interesting post. Do you have a source for this part?

We arrest more people now than at any point in our history. We incarcerate more people than we ever have, on a per captita basis and in total. Prior to 1980, our per capita incarceration rate had never been higher than 137 per 100,000 in state and federal prisons. The old record had been set in 1939, but for most of the twentieth century our incarceration rate hovered around 100 per 100,000, sometimes less, sometimes more, but it rarely ever topped 120 per hundred thousand. Today it is 486 per 100,000. If you count those in jails along with those in prisons, it goes on up to 726 per 100,000. This is the highest incarceration rate in the entire world. We now have more people behind bars on a per capita basis and in total than any other country in the world. The only countries with incarceration rates anywhere close to ours are places like Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and other wonderful places like that...and the others sharing the top ten spot with us are all a good bit behind us with incarceration rates in the 400's to 600's per hundred thousand range. All this locking people up entirely unprecedented in this country. There is nothing conservative about it.

I did that post all from memory as my computer with all of my saved links died. I'm working with a new PC and will have to pull these up as I go so I might not be able to find all my sources without spending more time than I have, but I'll give you what I can.

Number and rate per 100,000 of prisoners in state and federal prisons from 1925 through 2004:

http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook/pdf/t6282004.pdf

Incarceration rate for jails and state and federal prisons combined (note: I've seen from government sources the incarceration rate listed as 726 and 724 per 100,000, not sure which is correct):

http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook/pdf/t6132004.pdf

Number of adults in jails, prison, on probation or parole from 1980 to 2004:

http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook/pdf/t612004.pdf

"Prisoners in 2004," short USDJ Bureau of Justice report with all sorts of data on incarceration rates, national and state by state, race and other demographics of prisoners, types of offenses, etc.:

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/p04.pdf

International incarceration rates:

http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs2/r188.pdf

*This is a 2003 government report from the UK. I've seen better but don't have time to keep looking. You can get the basic stats from the first page, no need to dig through all the volumes of information. Note how they say their incarceration rate of 139 per 100,000 in 2003 was the highest among the countries in the European Union.

Here is what appears to be a newer list. You have to click on the "World Prison Brief" link and then click "Highest to Lowest Rates." Then you can choose to look at prison populations by country or have it listed by incarceration rates per country. The list appears to have the latest available data. According to this list, one of the countries I listed as being in the top ten with respect to incarceration rates, Kazakhstan, has now dropped to number 24. The others I mentioned are still in the top ten and we are still number one by a good margin. Note that the "Prison Population Totals" list shows China as having the second highest total number of people incarcerated at 1,548,498, compared to well over 2 million incarcerated in the U.S. China has over a billion people, we have something like 280 million. No other countries have a million or more people incarcerated. Russia has a little over 800,000 incarcerated, Brazil a little over 330,000, India a little over 322,000, Mexico slightly over 201,000 and the rest of the countries in the world listed have under 200,000 incarcerated. From what I have read about 25% of the people incarcerated in the world are incarcerated right here in the land of the free where less than 5% of the world's population lives.

http://www.prisonstudies.org/