US is world's leading jailer: Human Rights Watch

NEW YORK - With 2.3 million people behind bars, the United States is the world's leading jailer, according to a leading human rights watchdog.

New figures show that US incarceration rates are climbing even higher, with racial minorities greatly over represented in prisons and jails, thus highlighting



the need to adopt alternative criminal justice policies, Human Rights Watch said.

"The new incarceration figures confirm the United States as the world's leading jailer," said David Fathi, US programmr director at Human Rights Watch.



"Americans should ask why the US locks up so many more people than do Canada, Britain, and other democracies."

Statistics released Friday by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a branch of the US Department of Justice, show that as of June 30, 2007, approximately 2.3



million persons were incarcerated in US prisons and jails, an all-time high.

This represents an incarceration rate of 762 per 100,000 US residents, the highest such rate in the world, HRW said. By contrast, the United Kingdom's