NEW YORK. June 7: With an incarceration rate of 762 per 100,000 US residents, the United States has become the world’s largest jailer, according to the Human Rights Watch (HRW).

In a report, the watchdog said: “New figures showing that US incarceration rates are climbing even higher, (and) with racial minorities greatly over-represented in prisons and jails, highlight the need to adopt alternative criminal justice policies.”

“Americans should ask why the US locks up so many more people than do Canada, Britain and other democracies,” said David Fathi, the director of the US programme at the HRW.

Data released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a branch of the US Department of Justice, showed that as of June 30, 2007, approximately 2.3 million persons were incarcerated in US prisons and jails, an all-time high. This represented an incarceration rate of 762 per 100,000 residents, the highest in the world.

In contrast, the UK’s incarceration rate is 152 per 100,000 residents; the rate in Canada is 108; and in France it is 91.

The HRW urged officials in the United States to eliminate mandatory minimum sentences for all drug offences and to adopt community-based sanctions and other alternatives to incarceration for low-level drug offenders.

The new statistics also showed big racial disparities, with black males incarcerated at a per capita rate six times that of white males. Nearly 11 per cent of all black men aged 30 to 34 were behind bars as of June 30, 2007.

In May this year the HRW released its report — “Targeting Blacks: Drug Law Enforcement and Race in the US” — in which it documented racial disparities in US drug law enforcement, with black men 11.8 times more likely than white men to enter prison on drug charges, even though the rates for use of illegal drugs in the two groups were similar.

Although whites, being more numerous, constitute the large majority of drug users, blacks constitute 54 per cent of all persons entering state prisons with new drug offence convictions.