Because US states have populations and areas comparable to other countries. Just the US topping the charts is expected. How many states you have to get through to see other countries is interesting.

[–] sexy_peach@feddit.org 0 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

See? This makes it look like it's as misleading as I said. This is prisoners per 100.000, that means it doesn't matter how populous a state or country is. That's exactly why comparing states with countries is misleading. For every state that has a higher number than the US average there's states that have a lower number.

[–] maniclucky@lemmy.world 1 points 37 minutes ago

You cannot directly compare two populations without accounting for differences in size. Doing otherwise is very bad data science. That's why it's per 100,000 and thus takes size out of the equation. Which is good. That's a confounding factor that is trivial to deal with. Given my previous observation that many US states have populations directly comparable to other countries, the "comparing states with countries" complaint goes from vaguely plausible to inane immediately.

Thank you for defining how averages work?

Source: data engineer

[–] IttihadChe@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 hours ago

Thats why they aren't just comparing each state just to the US average but to other countries.

There are 35/50 states on the graph, with 34 of them above the 2nd highest country (el Salvador).

This shows that even the US states that are lower than average are still higher than other countries.