They are, and I agree it’s misleading. It’s implying that it’s somehow shocking that the individual states of the county with the highest incarceration rate in the world also have a high incarceration rate. If it was absolute numbers, it would maybe make a point. As it is, it’s stating the extremely obvious and framing it as “look, it’s even worse than you thought”.
If it was absolute numbers, it would maybe make a point.
If you have a population with 10M people and 20,000 of them are prisoners, that’s significantly less concerning than a country with 100,000 people of which 10,000 are prisoners. You can’t make an apples-to-apples comparison between Texas and Wyoming with raw head-count.
it’s somehow shocking that the individual states of the county with the highest incarceration rate in the world also have a high incarceration rate
It’s shocking that the state of Louisiana has a full 2% of its population in jail. That’s twice the US national baseline.
It shows which US states contribute more to the US incarceration rate and clearly shows that even those that contribute the least are above the majority of the nations’ incarceration rates. The latter is not obvious without visualizing the data in this way.
They are, and I agree it’s misleading. It’s implying that it’s somehow shocking that the individual states of the county with the highest incarceration rate in the world also have a high incarceration rate. If it was absolute numbers, it would maybe make a point. As it is, it’s stating the extremely obvious and framing it as “look, it’s even worse than you thought”.
If you have a population with 10M people and 20,000 of them are prisoners, that’s significantly less concerning than a country with 100,000 people of which 10,000 are prisoners. You can’t make an apples-to-apples comparison between Texas and Wyoming with raw head-count.
It’s shocking that the state of Louisiana has a full 2% of its population in jail. That’s twice the US national baseline.
It shows which US states contribute more to the US incarceration rate and clearly shows that even those that contribute the least are above the majority of the nations’ incarceration rates. The latter is not obvious without visualizing the data in this way.