because it has vastly more crime than comparable nations. you have to look at what happens to crime in the US over time, when you are more or less stringent about jailing criminals; predictably as you fill the jails, crime goes down, and when you empty them, crimes goes up.
>It seems that you imagine that the crime is somehow intrinsic to the current group of people committing it, and that by removing them from society, their behavior would not recur.
people try to smuggle this false premise into discussions about law and order all the time. the primary purpose of jail is not rehabilitation, it is to protect the public from criminals. you put them in jail so that they can't commit crimes. if they commit crimes when they leave, put them in jail again. jails mostly don't rehabilitate criminals, but that's a failure of the idea of mass rehabilitation, not a failure of mass incarceration. crime is a choice.
