I find it sad to see this type of argument, increasingly it seems our only justification for the decline of the US is, "At least we're not as bad as X." As in, "Sure companies and the gov sell all our data, but at least we're not like China!". Feels like we've given up even trying to live up to our liberal Western ideals...

It's not a justification for anything.

It is a response providing perspective to questions like "but are we much better?"

Agreed, and I should of elaborated: sure we're worse in the case of incarceration, but our legal system is still way better than in other countries.

There's nothing wrong with comparisons. I just wonder why we started comparing ourselves with the worst rather than the best.

The U.S. has the single highest incarceration rate in the world. In that respect, we have the worst criminal justice system in the world. Other metrics matter, of course, but let's not kid ourselves: the American system is an unmitigated disaster.

I see several comments complaining about the US incarceration rate without mentioning the US crime rate. You can’t credibly assert that the US incarceration rate is too high without knowing how it compares to the crime rate.

More than just the crime rate, the rate at which crimes are successfully prosecuted and the resources exist to enable incarceration. Some countries that have a very high crime rate [1], but have a much lower rate of incarceration than the US [2]. In these cases, the US having a higher prison population is just a consequence of the US being wealthy.

1. http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/crime-rate-by-cou...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...

> I see several comments complaining about the US incarceration rate without mentioning the US crime rate.

The former is a major cause of the latter.

> You can’t credibly assert that the US incarceration rate is too high without knowing how it compares to the crime rate.

The incarceration rate is too high, in part, because it drives the crime rate.

It's also too high because it's historically largely a product of criminal justice policies adopted as a direct replacement for chattel slavery as a tool of racial suppression and which have continued to this day with that effect, having spread beyond the region which had chattel slavery to replace to the whole nation.

This is particularly true of penal slavery.

A high crime rate is a telltale sign of a dysfunctional society, anyway. Something is rotten.

The US does not have the same class structure as most developed nations. We have 40 million black Americans who are descended from slaves and faced legal discrimination up until the mid-1960s. This population makes up a disproportionate share of our prison population. Since then, a second extremely large ethnic underclass had immigrated across the US’s southern border. This population also makes up a disproportionate share of our prison population. As far as I am aware, this is unique among developed western nations.

There's more to it than that - there's the plea bargain system, which is largely considered to be unethical elsewhere, that increases the _conviction_ rate.

In some places, incarceration rates could be lower only because capital punishment is much more widely used.

Not that US's incarceration rates are sane; to the contrary.

I definitely think that incarceration is actively harmful at fighting crime, because it puts a criminal in an environment of worse criminals, and provides room and board to just hang with them and learn their rules by heart (or be abused, or killed by them). Then the felon is released and has a lot of trouble finding work, so the new criminal knowledge burns to be used.

You can sanity check those assumptions. Worldwide executions are rare especially compared to US incarceration rates.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2019/04/death-penalty...