Christopher Caldwell’s thoughtful article on the status of Muslim immigrants in Sweden includes a staggering statistic:

In 2004, there were only 329 people serving sentences of more than five years in all of Sweden.

By contrast, the United States has approximately 132,000 prisoners serving life sentences and sentenced 430,000 individuals to state prisons for a mean sentence length of four years in 2002 alone, which means that at any given time there are hundreds of thousands of people serving more than a five year sentence in state or federal prison in this country.

Even accounting for the much smaller population of Sweden (approximately 9 million), these disparities are unbelievable. Obviously, there is a complex debate about the causes of the difference in the prison populations, but its sheer magnitude is shocking to me.