(Graph: Emily Widra, 2021)

This graph originally appeared in States of Incarceration: The Global Context 2021.

We compared the incarceration rates of countries and U.S. states against "violent crime," which we calculated based on four categories of offense types—murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, rape and sexual violence, robbery, and aggravated and serious assault — that have available data across 98 countries with populations over 500,000 and the U.S. states. (For more on how we calculated "violent crime" for the 98 countries and the scarcity of alternative measures, see the methodology.)