So?

We have many criminals.

Criminals deserve punishment, including jail should the crime be severe enough.

Criminals prey on law abiding citizens.

If you won't enforce the law, citizens will take the law into the their own hands.

Then you will be forced to cry for criminals even more than you are doing now.

Imprisoning people is treating the symptom, not the cause.

If you don't treat the cause, then you'll just continue getting more symptoms.

Maybe we should figure out what it is about the USA that keeps generating so much more antisocial behavior than everywhere else and fix that.

Seems like the problem in the US is there are pockets of society which have multi generational issues where the parents don’t know how to teach their kids to be successful since their lives have been a failure too. As well as an environment that normalises crime.

It seems extremely difficult to break this cycle without actually removing kids from their parents/friend groups.

Another complicating factor could be that the US has a more diverse population. Tribalism is hard to overcome, especially with a messy history of racism and oppression.

How is this unique to the US?

That is a really simple take on law and human behavior. Are we really going to ignore all of our modern understanding of psychology to say "criminal bad, criminal deserve jail"?

One of reasons of large prison population is long sentences. Shorter sentences with better enforcement can be a better deterrent.

Yes, if they deserve to be in prison and aren't.

So then the problem is why do more people deserve to be in prison in the US in particular?

Whichever way you cut it, it's bad for society for it to be such a large percentage.

Too few and too many aren't mutually exclusive, it is quite possible that the wrong people are in prison.

You could punish in other ways than prison. Especially in a way to make them repair the damage they did.