Very true. Just the knee jerk reaction to charge people with good intentions speaks volumes. I guess, therefore, the overwhelming posts on this thread which are against my point of view shouldn't surprise me, nor should the stats below, but they do...
"The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners."
U.S. prison population dwarfs that of other nations - The New York Times
Something that seems amiss in the article: For-profit prisons are, to my knowledge, a common thing in the US, creating an economic motivation to put people into prison. That might be another reason why people are kept in prison longer in the US than elsewhere.