Despite being one of the wealthiest countries in the world, the United States has an unusually high poverty rate; among OECD countries, only Israel and Mexico have higher percentages of their population living in poverty than the United States’ 17.9% in 2012. Even the official U.S. Census measurement of 15.1% in 2010 means that roughly 45 million Americans live below the poverty line. Further, there are significant racial disparities in the poverty rate, with 27.4% of African Americans and 26.6% of Latinos falling below the poverty line in 2010, compared with just 9.9% of non-Hispanic Whites. While many causes have been postulated for the U.S.’s abnormally high poverty rate, one particularly interesting potential cause is America’s extremely high incarceration rate. Not only does the United States have the largest prison population by far in both absolute and relative terms, but the racial disparities in incarceration rate mirror the racial disparities in the poverty rate. As of 2012, the United States imprisoned had 707 prisoners per 100,000 population, well ahead of the second highest country, Russia, which had an incarceration rate of 450 per 100,000. From 1970 to the present, the U.S. prison population increased from 300,000 to 2.2 million, accounting for a quarter of the world’s prisoners. Further, a further 5 million Americans were on probation or parole in 2008, meaning that approximately 1 out of 31 Americans are under the control of the criminal justice system at any given time.
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