America: The great prison nation

We now have record levels of imprisonment in England and Wales. Using a western European barometer to measure our prison population, we imprison over twice as many people as Italy and Denmark, and incarcerate more of our citizens than, for example, France, Portugal, Germany, Switzerland, or the Netherlands. Of our major western European neighbours, only Spain currently approaches English levels of imprisonment. Yet our rates of imprisonment pale into insignificance when compared with the unprecedented industrial scale of incarceration in the United States of America.