The real goals are to satisfy the belief systems of those who subscribe to “fire and brimstone”, where criminals are sinners who must be punished. It’s (sometimes) less religious in nature these days but the undercurrent has always been in the US since pre-colonial times.

The fire and brimstone crowd did not initially lock people away for extended periods of time. They whipped people, publicly shamed them, executed them, etc. The "penitentiary" was explicitly a reformist idea that people could be improved by education instead of punishment. Instead of whipping and executing criminals, we would put them in an institution of "penitence" -- quiet reflection leading to appreciation of the wrongness of one's actions and the need to act in harmony with the benefit of others and society as a whole. This enlightened, benevolent approach would stress mutual benefit rather than punishment, even if it wasn't pleasant to lose one's freedom temporarily.

After a while we lost our optimism about the penitentiary concept and decided that being locked up was just a pointless ordeal, which made it popular with people who believe the goals of criminal sentencing should be punishment, deterrence, and keeping dangerous people separated from society, and less popular with those who favor a benevolent approach.

Penalties in Japan and China are often worse despite no tradition of fire and brimstone. Feels like you’re just taking your own personal biases and stretching them to explain complex phenomena.

Neither incarcerates anywhere near as large a proportion of their population. The US jails 631 per 100,000 compared to 121 in China and 38 in Japan.

There are certainly other factors, like the presence of a large group of “othered” people with less opportunity, but there is no doubt a vengeance streak running through the American conversation on criminal punishment.

> According to official ballot materials promoting the original Three Strikes law, the sentencing scheme was intended to “keep murderers, rapists, and child molesters behind bars, where they belong.” However, today, more than half of inmates sentenced under the law are serving sentences for nonviolent crimes.

https://law.stanford.edu/three-strikes-project/three-strikes...

Americans commit crime at vastly higher rates than Japanese, so it makes sense that the number of Americans in jail is higher. Or is there some ideal number of people in jail we should be aiming for, regardless of crime?

The US has the highest rate of incarceration globally, with about 21% of prisoners in 2015 despite having only 4.4% of world population. 639 per 100k is a pretty high rate. The 2nd ranked OECD country for incarceration rate, Turkey, has 335 per 100k.

Despite the high incarceration rate, the US is ranked third in the OECD for homicide, fourth in rape, eighth in robbery, sixteenth in assault, thirteenth in burglary and tenth in vehicle theft in the OECD. The US generally also jails people longer than most other countries; the ratio of people in prison to people who get convicted per year is much higher than in other countries, and those weren't the first "tough-on-crime" laws by any means.

And so for the highest imprisonment rate in the world, amongst the OECD the United States is still amongst the top half of the 32 OECD countries for every category of violent crime. It's not like these are short-term effects either, we've been jailing people under three-strikes for a generation going on two. It's pretty clear evidence that a high rate of imprisonment is not actually reducing crime.

https://www.civitas.org.uk/content/files/crime_stats_oecdjan...

It is closer to old testament style punishment in a country that pretends to be largely christian. Do they even know about that Jesus guy and the books written about him (new testament)?

The amount of corruption, sheriffs getting to pocket the money for prison food, judges getting kickbacks for convictions, guaranteed prison quotas, exceptions from slavery laws, etc. don't help either.

It's way past Old Testament, and closer to the scary stories Israelites were told about what their neighboring nations are doing. Laws given/described in Old Testament were harsh, but there was a sense of proportionality in them.

Take care not to romanticize the Old Testament or its laws. Plenty of genocide and wives-of-jealous-husbands-must-drink-dusty-water misogyny in there.

IME the excuses made for it and cherry picking from it have only reinforced bad habits. Stuff like appeal to authority, survivorship bias, and trusting intuition over data.

>> I don't fully understand the real goals of the US system

Cheap labour. The 13 amendment of the U.S. constitution prohibits slavery, except as a punishment from crime.

Prison labour is a multi-billion dollar industry.