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Isn't some of that downstream from a limited supply of prison housing? I remember when Covid happened, and because prisoners are the one group in the United States whose health is the responsibility of the US government, a lot of non-violent prisoners were temporarily being released to house arrest in order to aid in social distancing, because otherwise the prisons would just be petri dishes of disease.
So, isn't the problem in many cases (varies by region I'm sure), that there just aren't enough prisons to hold all the people we might want to imprison? In which case the answer is "easy", just make more prisons. Except that because of NIMBYism, everyone tries to make sure that the prison doesn't get built near their neighborhood and hardly anything gets built half the time.
I think it's largely a consequence of US liberal leftists, including ones who consider themselves moderate and centrist-adjacent, having adopted a completely dismissive and critical attitude towards the War on Drugs, largely as one expression of their hard antagonism towards Nixon and Reagan, and in turn having adopted the same attitude towards the steep growth of incarcerations rates during the Reagan and Clinton years. (The growth was indeed steep, to be sure.) As layman I think they are interpreting this whole phenomenon as thus: it was all done to cynically pander to disgusting white middle-class racist garbage humans and it represented an absolute erosion and betrayal of the glorious wonder that was the Civil Rights Movement. Yet again the helpless black minority was thrown under the bus to suffer in AmeriKKKa. Nixon and Reagan were just horrible ghouls. That Clinton guy may have been sort of decent, but when he actually tried to implement rather moderate measures to advance liberalism, GOP goons rallied their deplorable base against him, and when the Democrats lost seats in the Senate and the House, unfortunately he had no choice but to compromise with these twats who just wanted to keep throwing disadvantaged black men in prison en masse. We cannot let this happen again.
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Prisons are built mostly in deep rural areas that are poor enough to welcome employment prospects of working as guards, or in situations where the government doesn't have local veto points(military bases etc), for precisely NIMBY reasons. This is a known and solved problem, and with enough money we could build enough prison to hold anyone who's gotten a jaywalking ticket.
The problem is getting people to prison. First, they need to be arrested. Mostly solved, but you've got to have a place to hold these people until trial and sentencing(takes a really long time, because these people have no incentive to play ball), and jail is usually located in urban/suburban areas reasonably near the scene of the crime. So you give people bail or an ankle monitor, because for constitutional reasons you can't just build the jail in the middle of nowhere where the alternative is cornfields/forests, so there's space limitations(and a lot of these jails are in downtown areas where there just literally isn't more room to expand). Then there's getting through the criminal justice process; our system relies on a large percentage of the (overwhelmingly guilty)suspects pleading guilty in exchange for reduced sentencing, but even that is way at the high end of the bandwidth our system has. You'd need a lot more judges and lawyers.
I say this all the time, look at pretty much any case where someone got off light and you'll almost always find that they pled guilty to it. It's basically impossible to get someone to not take things to trial unless you give them a really nice deal, so a lot of a prosecutor's job is just triaging their resources, trying to balance the various factors between likelyhood to win at a trial/severity of the crime/who will actually take a plea deal/etc.
It lets off the guilty, but it also has the opposite effect too of punishing the innocent. Completely innocent people don't have the time or resources to fight in court and their defense attorneys are probably swamped as well, so they're also incentived to just take a plea deal. There's plenty of cases where people have a strong alibi/evidence to prove they are innocent and yet take a plea deal anyway because it's better than the actual process.
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