Cayman is ranked number 20 in the world. Caribbean countries occupy 11 places
The number 1 country is the USA and Russia is in seventh place. St Kitts and Nevis comes a close second.
Shouldn’t we be proud? Our tiny country is ranked amongst the top 20 in the world!
Actually we shouldn’t.
iNews Cayman was sent the following article by one of our overseas readers who was appalled to find us in the Top 20.
This is the article we were sent from The Huffington Post
Here are all of the nations that incarcerate more of their population than the U.S.
By Nick Wing
A lot has been reported about our nation’s prison system and its bloated population, but this is what it looks like when you take all of the countries that jail more people than we do and put them into one picture (see attached).
Answer: 0
Yeah, we’re actually number one and that’s not a good thing.
No country incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than the United States. At 716 per 100,000 people, according to the International Centre for Prison Studies, the U.S. tops every other nation in the world.
See attached Graphic via Statista (and the name Cayman islands)
Among OECD countries, the competition isn’t even close — Israel comes in second, at 223 per 100,000.
According to advance 2012 counts by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the U.S. prison population was 1,571,013 at yearend. That’s actually a decline for the third consecutive year. Including local and city jail figures, however, that number easily tops two million, around 25 percent of the entire world’s prisoners.
On Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder announced sweeping plans designed to address the issue through drug-sentencing reform. Holder’s blueprint included plans to divert low-level drug offenders to treatment and community service programs and implement an expanded prison program to allow for the release of some elderly, non-violent offenders.
“We need to ensure that incarceration is used to punish, deter and rehabilitate – not merely to convict, warehouse and forget,” Holder said in remarks to the American Bar Association in San Francisco. “Although incarceration has a role to play in our justice system, widespread incarceration at the federal, state and local levels is both ineffective and unsustainable. … It imposes a significant economic burden — totaling $80 billion in 2010 alone — and it comes with human and moral costs that are impossible to calculate.
For more on this story go to:
“Yeah, we’re actually number twenty and that’s not a good thing.” No it’s appalling!
When I arrived in the Cayman Islands over thirty years ago one of most striking statistics our tourist board, hotel associations and the like were lauding was the low level of crime. “You could walk the beaches safely at night”. “You can leave your premises and cars unlocked”.
Now that was indeed something to be proud of.
Wouldn’t it have been nice to be #196 in the incarceration
