Incarceration rates provide extremely useful information for assessing the state of criminal justice systems and for their comparison. Incarceration rates of countries inform on the global state of imprisonment and criminal justice; below the level of nations, incarceration rates of specific populations, often ethnic minorities, signal differential treatment of social groups within the criminal justice system of a country. Incarceration rates are generally defined as the number of individuals per 100,000 of the population who are in a prison or a facility of detention attached to a criminal justice procedure in a given year or during another defined time period. They are the result of the procedures and decisions within the criminal justice system and as such represent one of the outcomes of these processes. ...