If I told you a given country had 5% of the world's population and 20% of all the prisoners, you might think that sounds high? I do. Solutions? I don't see where we are in a good place to start working on that as a country, honestly.
I would need to know a few qualifier stats to even know whether our number is high, such as:
- how many of said prisoners are foreign citizens with a prior criminal history (i.e., maybe a certain % of that number shouldn't have even been on US soil to commit crimes in the first place). Deport them, you can't really allow them in, then blame the mean old US for having "too many prisoners".
- what % of those incarcerated are in because they're "insane" or whatever the PC term is these days? We need more mental institutions, which was on Goat's list. Put them where they belong and remove them from the numbers.
- what % of those incarcerated are for violent offenses? I would want to separate the non-violent out in a separate category, and I probably wouldn't jail as many for non-violent crimes anyway (other than repeat offenders). Claiming we put too many poor black kids in jail (which some people do) but also including the broad number of drug or traffic offenders in the "confirmation" of that claim doesn't make sense to me.
- speaking of, how many said prisoners are repeat offenders (maybe certain policies have allowed or led to more career criminals, who need to be eliminated if they just refuse to live in civilized society.)
- how many in that number are serving life sentences because of the heinous nature of their crimes, but their particular state has chosen to outlaw capital punishment? I'd eliminate them almost immediately. That's how Iran keeps their prisoner numbers low - although I assume we'd have a higher threshold of what calls for capital punishment than "she showed her eyes to someone on the street".
I could probably come up with more, but my main point is this: using such a broad stat ("too many prisoners!") against our country seems a little prejudiced. Our government, or the people running it, have created the jail overpopulation problem in many ways -- we've allowed or even invited many of these people who are in prison into the system ourselves -- and now we're complaining that there are too many of them in the system.