ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to explore a visual picture of the use of imprisonment in Europe and America. The situation in the USA becomes even more accentuated. The USA is an extremely deviant case, surrounded as it is by Canada and Mexico, culturally and economically two vastly different countries, but both with prison populations below 130 per 100,000 inhabitants. Thought patterns and general theories are not impractical symbols in brains or books. The belief in prison populations as indicators of crime, and the resistance this belief shows to the facts, are in harmony with the old perspectives based on natural law, and with reactive thinking. The United States also keeps good statistics on persons under the control of penal law outside the prisons.
