evidence: The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any independent democracy on earth — worse, every single state incarcerates more people per capita than most nations. In the global context, even "progressive" U.S. states like New York and Massachusetts appear as extreme as Louisiana and Mississippi in their use of prisons and jails. [...] If we imagine every state as an independent nation, as in the graph above, every state appears extreme. While El Salvador has an incarceration rate higher than any U.S. state,1 nine states have the next highest incarceration rates in the world, followed by Cuba. Overall, 24 U.S. states and three nations (El Salvador, Cuba, and Rwanda)2 have incarceration rates even higher than the national incarceration rate of the United States. Massachusetts, the state with the lowest incarceration rate in the nation, would rank 30th in the world with an incarceration rate higher than Iran, Colombia, and all the founding NATO nations.