70 million represents 1/3 of all adults in the US. And yes, they all have records.

To be fair, I have a record and I've never been convicted of any crime. Any police interaction beyond a speeding ticket, whether or not it involves charges, and whether or not you're convicted, will result in an official police record of the interaction (or the charges, if applicable).

I was charged with a lot of counts of some nasty-sounding (non-violent, non-sexual, non-financial) stuff that was dropped almost immediately after I retained an attorney because it was completely bogus. I still have to explain it probably 25% of the time I have an employment background check done.

Last I checked, the US has the most people incarcerated in the entire world, both by per capita and total incarcerated population. The land of the free...

Yup, still accurate:

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/incarcera...

While the US has approximately 5% of the world's population, it has more than 25% of the incarcerated population.

Lots of places around the world under-incarcerate their criminals, sadly. India has 70 rapes per day, and a conviction rate of just 30%. Sub-Saharan Africa is even worse.

Just to how much the US is incarcerating, the difference between India's incarcerated the US incarcerated is 1,590,200. Assuming 70 rapes per day with 70% (49 per day) not convicted, it would take 32,453 days (approx 88 years) at 100% conviction rate to match the US's current incarceration rate.

Of course, rapes aren't the only crime that goes unpunished in certain parts of the world. Half of my family is from the African country of Liberia. Google tells me their incarceration rate is 1/10th of the US.

I don't know what to tell you if you think the crime rate there is 1/10 of the US.

>I don't know what to tell you if you think the crime rate there is 1/10 of the US.

From what I understand it's not so much the amount of crime, but the duration of the punishment that causes the US problem.

Most justice-involved people in the U.S. are not accused of serious crimes; more often, they are charged with misdemeanors or non-criminal violations. Yet even low-level offenses, like technical violations of probation and parole, can lead to incarceration and other serious consequences.

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html

I would be truly amazed if there weren't 70 rapes per day in some individual states, let alone the US at large. I'd also be surprised if there were only 70 per day in India. Where did you find this number?

Is that an attempt to justify the mind boggling incarceration rate in the US?

hmm not really. It's more pointing out a good reason for the global disparity. It's a simple statistical thought process... another example is that the US is also heavily overrepresented in the number of LGBT people, because many other countries, particularly high-population countries repress that.

If you don't compare all-else being equal, you're going to have other factors playing into the resulting figure.

This seems to be the number of Americans with a criminal record and not a criminal conviction (someone who was found to be innocent would also be included in this number). I can't seem to find the number of Americans with a conviction though.

For-profit prisons.

For-profit prisons are a tiny minority of prisons in the US.

You're right. About 10%. They are a relatively small player.

8% of prisoners in for profit prisons ? 5.6 million people, that's not tiny.

No ~8% of those incarcerated are in private prisons

War on drugs.

All of the above plus systemic racism and a cultural aversion to non-punitive solutions to issues like drug abuse and mental illness.

Sure it's technically true but an unpaid parking ticket counts as a criminal record. At any rate, of the 70 million people with a "criminal record", only 16 million have been to prison. That's still a high figure but it's not the insane "1 in 5 Americans are criminals!"

No, Kranar-the 70 million does not include unpaid parking tickets, unless it escalates to a criminal case (which rarely happens). The explosion in these numbers occurred during our war on drugs in the 80's and 90's, along with "three strikes" laws.

The 70 million number relates to the number of people who have, in their record, an event(s) that might stand in their way from a variety of opportunities, so they are, by definition, serious events.

Failure to pay a parking ticket by the due date or failure to appear in court to contest a traffic ticket can result in a bench warrant for your arrest which results in a criminal record. Also, in many jurisdictions if you do not appear for a petty misdemeanor traffic ticket, you can be found guilty for failure to appear which also results in a criminal record.

No you will not go to prison over it but if you are subsequently pulled over, you can be arrested for your unpaid traffic ticket and held in jail until a court has a hearing on your case (and it goes without saying this will result in a criminal record).

Are you arguing with the guy whose literal business it was to know the facts of these situations?

Why can’t one argue with anyone? Just saying.

I don't look at people's usernames when replying. Everything I stated can be verified:

https://www.findlaw.com/traffic/traffic-tickets/arrest-warra...

I never disputed or argued anything about whether having a criminal record impedes ones ability to get a job. I replied to someone who was shocked that 70 million Americans have a criminal record and want to point out that it does not mean that 70 million Americans are criminals, or have been convicted of a crime. The vast majority of those records are strictly for arrests, most of which did not result in a conviction and could be the result of something as benign as having an unpaid parking ticket, which is a verifiable fact.

OP's reply is that parking tickets rarely result in arrest warrants or jail time. I could not find data for the U.S. as a whole, but at least in Texas over 1 million arrest warrants were issued in 2018 alone just over unpaid traffic tickets to the point that the legislature had to step in to request judges stop putting people in jail over it:

https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2019/04/texas-aske...

You can find similar articles about other states (this seems to be a mostly state by state).

For further information about how the 70 million people have criminal records gives a misleading impression, there's the following Politifact article as well:

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/aug/18/andrew-cuo...

I don't think the linked Politifact article supports your point:

> The FBI considers anyone who has been arrested on a felony charge to have a criminal record, even if the arrest did not lead to a conviction. The FBI only counts those with a misdemeanor if a state agency asks the bureau to keep it on file.

> So by the FBI’s standard, 73.5 million people in the United States had a criminal record as of June 30[, 2017].

The arrest warrants you mention from Texas would only count if failure to pay a parking ticket is a felony in TX

Then you fail to understand what is a fairly basic point, which is that most people misinterpret the meaning of a criminal record and think that 70 million people in the U.S. were at some point criminals, when in fact a criminal record can be issued simply for an arrest (even if you turn out to be innocent), as well as benign matters such as an unpaid parking ticket.

The FBI might not keep track of unpaid parking tickets in Texas as part of their own criminal record database, but Texas does keep unpaid parking tickets on record for their own criminal background check:

https://texas.staterecords.org/criminal.php

As that site points out, any arrest or warrant for arrest even for a misdemeanor will be recorded in a criminal background check.

Different government agencies have different standards for what goes into a criminal record so that there is no such thing as one single unambiguous definition for what a criminal record is. Consequently most people, including hiring managers, or people on Hacker News shocked that 70 million people have such a record, may misinterpret what a criminal record means, what the implications of one are and how serious having one is.

There is no harm in pointing out to people that a criminal record, in and of itself, does not mean that someone is guilty of a criminal offense or even that they're guilty of something serious. It could be something benign like an unpaid parking ticket or someone was arrested who turned out to be entirely innocent.

The 70 million number (the one you were specifically nitpicking) comes from the FBI database, not from a union of state level databases. So that's 70 million people who have been convicted of or arrested on a felony charge, or had a state explicitly ask the FBI to retain a record of their misdemeanor arrest, per your source.

OP was clear in this thread that "criminal record" wasn't synonymous with "has been to prison." This point was also explained to me explicitly during all the pre-employment background checks I have had.

Still, one American out of three has been once arrested??? From my entire circle I only know of one person which almost got arrested, but true I'm not in the USA...

Having (or having had) an outstanding bench warrant for your arrest sounds like the kind of thing that could really mess up your employment prospects, though!

I'm really not sure what you're trying to dispute. It seems like you and OP agree that there are many ways that someone can get themselves a criminal record and that a record shouldn't be a lifelong burden that prevents you from getting a decent job.

My original post was not in response to OP but to someone who is shocked that 70 million people have a criminal record, because most people when asked assume that a criminal record means some kind of conviction, it does not.

It was OP who decided to dispute me and argue that unpaid parking tickets are unlikely to result in an arrest or a criminal matter. I replied pointing out with sources that his claim is wrong. A surprising number of people are in jail over unpaid parking tickets and in Texas in one year alone over 1 million unpaid tickets became a criminal matter resulting in jail time.

I agree that OP seems to argue against this is bizzare since even a record for unpaid traffic offenses can needlessly disqualify someone from a job, but I am not OP and all I really care to do is point out the facts.

If 16 million have been to prison, this probably doesn't count people who have been to jail but not prison, or who have been given probation and/or community service as their sentence, which I suspect is probably where 70 million comes from.

Prison is for sentences of longer than 1 year in the U.S. but I'd reckon any sentence affects your job prospects negatively.

You can get a misdemeanor for a lot of things. Public urination, drunk and disorderly conduct, soliciting a prostitute, etc.

Canada also has a high number of people with criminal records -- about 10%.

This number was shocking to me. I only looked it up last year when one of our politicians made a bunch of noise about criminals getting vaccinated before citizens.

The UK number is ~16%.

I think the bottom line is there are lots of folks with criminal records, it's not just the US.