Part of the reason is that we can't even afford a suitable correctional and judiciary system. Here, most cases such as theft, assault get settled at the police station (precinct) by dialogue between the affected parties, and bail, cough bribe paid. Maybe our relative poverty favors us this way, because honestly I'll never wish my worst enemy to spend time in a Nigerian prison, it's horrible.
As a side note, the Central African Republic is the country with the lowest incarceration rate [3] and it's a major warzone.
1- https://www.prisonstudies.org/country/nigeria
2 - https://www.statista.com/statistics/262962/countries-with-th...
3 - https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/lowest-pr...
As a policy-maker, Law Enforcement, you should be optimizing for
f(Incarceration Rate) * f(Violent/Property Crime Rate)
Merely focusing on Incarceration rate (which the progressives are so fixated on) is naive.
Pakistan has a lower incarceration rate than Japan. So does The Central African Republic.
India's incarceration rate is equal to Iceland, among the lowest in the world.
Some of the most dangerous places on the planet have comically hyper low incarceration rates.
Without a lot more context incarceration rates don't tell you very much in fact.