U.S. has world's largest number of prisoners: report

Nearly 2.2 million inmates were held in state and federal prisons or country and municipal jails in the United States by the end of 2005, which was the largest in the world, says the Human Rights Record of the United States in 2006 issued here on Thursday.

Statistics of the U.S. Department of Justice showed that the adult U.S. correctional population, including those on probation or parole, reached a high of more than seven million men and women for the first time.

About three percent of the U.S. adult population, or one in every 32 adults, were in the nation's prisons and jails or on probation or parole, according to a Human Rights Watch report on December 1, 2006.

As a result, state prisons were operating between one percent under and 14 percent over capacity.

The Agence France-Presse reported on November 30, 2006 that the federal system was operating at 34 percent over capacity.

And another report of New York-based China Press on October 4, 2006 said there were currently 173,000 people jailed in the prisons of California, and 1,700 of them failed to have normal living conditions.