See how Ohio’s incarceration rate compares with other states

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) – A recent study found Ohio’s incarceration rate is higher than those of all founding NATO countries, including the United States.

The study was conducted by the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit that produces research on prisons and incarceration. The initiative, which describes itself as nonpartisan, supports criminal justice reform and ending “mass incarceration."

The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any independent democracy in the world, according to the nonprofit. When researchers put the incarceration rates of U.S. states in a global context, they found that every state “incarcerates more people per capita than most nations.”

Researchers compiled the number of people in state prisons, local jails, federal prisons, and other systems of confinement, such as those detained by the U.S. Marshals Service and those committed to psychiatric hospitals as the result of criminal charges. The organization used the most recent data from sources such as the United States Department of Justice and the World Prison Brief database to calculate incarceration rates per 100,000 people.

Ohio had an incarceration rate of 621 incarcerations per 100,000 people, rising above the national rate of 608, and ranking higher than 27 other states. In the comparison, which included countries with a population of at least 500,000, Ohio ranked just below Rwanda (637) and had an incarceration rate higher than all founding NATO countries.

El Salvador had the highest rate reported in the study, with 1,086 incarcerations per 100,000 people. Nine U.S. states had the next highest incarceration rates in the world, per researcher’s analysis, followed by Cuba. 

The top U.S. state was Louisiana (1,067), followed by Mississippi (1,020), Arkansas (912), Oklahoma (905), Alabama (898), Kentucky (889), Georgia (881), Tennessee (817) and South Dakota (812). 

Overall, 25 U.S. states, including Ohio, and three nations (El Salvador, Cuba, and Rwanda) have incarceration rates higher than the incarceration rate of the United States.

The lowest rate among U.S. states was Massachusetts, at 241 per 100,000 residents. Massachusetts still ranked higher than over 140 nations, including Iran (228), Mexico (174), China (165), Canada (88) and Germany (67).