NEW YORK, April 23: With less than 5 per cent of world’s population, United States has almost quarter of the world’s prisoners in jails, the New York Times said on Wednesday.

United States, the newspaper said led the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment.

Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad cheques to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other countries.

Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialised nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences, the Times said.

The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Centre for Prison Studies at King’s College London.

China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison.

San Marino, with a population of about 30,000, is at the end of the long list of 218 countries compiled by the centre. It has just one prisoner.

The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies centre, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)

The only other major industrialised nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. UK rate is 151, Germany’s is 88 and Japan’s is 63.

The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.