That's state only; in total it's ~20%.

That still hugely misses the point, because sentences are not equal. Violent offenders serve on average 4.7 years while drug offenders serve under 2 years.

~40% of people who are sent to state prison are sent with drugs as the most serious charge.

https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/tssp16.pdf

15% of the US prison population is a huge number of people.

And I'm assuming they mean incarcerated (jail+prison) and not just 'jail'. Most of the people in jail are awaiting trial, people in prison have been convicted.

The article linked in the comment you're replying to seems to include both jail and prison. The comment itself didn't mention either and just said "incarcerated".

> Only 2% of federal criminal defendants go to trial, and most who do are found guilty

From pew research

That's about where i expected it to be actually, and that's about 200k people, so it's pretty bad.