evidence: Incarceration Rates in an International Perspective - Marc MauerMarc MauerThe Sentencing Project A nation’s rate of incarceration is the number of people incarcerated as a proportion of its total population. Internationally, there is broad variation in the degree to which nations incarcerate their citizens, with a nearly 40-fold difference between the highest and lowest rates. The incarceration rate is often interpreted as a measurement of the degree of punitiveness in a society, although it is an imperfect measurement. Factors that may influence these rates include rates of serious crime, law enforcement and prosecutorial decision making, scale of prison admissions, length of time served in prison, and other means of social control in a society. [...] But even in modern societies, other means of social control, such as immigration and detention systems, need to be assessed. Within the criminal justice system, control is exerted through incarceration but also through community supervision under probation or parole. These latter systems are generally less severe in their restrictions, but they nonetheless place limitations on freedom of association, freedom of movement, consumption of alcohol, and a host of other behaviors. In the United States, states such as Rhode Island and Minnesota have very low incarceration rates by American standards, but conversely, they have high community supervision rates (Glaze, Kaeble, Minton, & Tsoutis, 2015).