It is one thing to know that the USA has a larger prison population than any other country in the world. It is another to see how the sausage is made - to see the process that actually puts people there.
In just a few days I've developed much more severe misgivings about the process that we use to put people in prison than I had before.
I dug into this on an unrelated debate on HN a few months back, and while drug charges do make up a large component of the prison population like you'd expect, violent crimes make up the majority. If you dig into local data, a lot of those violent crimes are domestic.
That gives some weight to the idea that the problem is long sentences, but admits some other ideas too, like that our prison population is less the product of criminal statutes or sentencing and more due to economic and educational inequalities. The US is large and diverse in a specific sort of way that may amplify this.
In just a few days I've developed much more severe misgivings about the process that we use to put people in prison than I had before.