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Somehow I doubt that Adis Ababa has the ability to mass imprison drug users, despite plausibly having much greater political will to do so. There are probably just fewer drug addicted homeless people there than in LA, and that's entirely plausible- it could be that people are too poor to buy drugs, or that robust extended family networks mean that no one is homeless(neither of these factors are at all incompatible with being a wartorn shithole). It's also possible that the lack of civil rights protections in Ethiopia mean that violators of the subway's code of conduct are simply beaten by police, and homeless crackheads respond rationally to incentives by not shitting on subway seats, without this actually resulting in fewer homeless crackheads.
No doubt this is true in most poor countries. And in fact, a system of brutalizing criminals is better than the U.S. system in all of these attributes:
Lower crime rate
Lower incidence of false conviction
Lower incidence of police brutality
But how can 3) be true if we are intentionally beating criminals? The reason is simple. Although the rates of brutality per criminal act would increase, the absolute number would be lower as crime would fall so low that there would be few criminals to beat.
On the other hand, a highly permissive society such as the United States will always have large absolute numbers of false convictions and police brutality because there are so many serious crimes committed every day.
Prediction: In the year 2025, if El Salvador maintains its current anti-crime policy, murder rates will be > 90% below peak levels, and police shooting rates will be > 50% below peak levels.
Most things respond best to negative reinforcement when it occurs temporally close to the action being punished and when it's consistent. The entire system of punishment in the US is biased against that: any negative repercussions will happen weeks or months after the transgression, and even then it's highly uncertain that a punishment will even be levied. (And if you're an individual defending yourself against a crime, the legal system has the potential to damage your life much worse than it will the criminal. Better to let him take out a dozen boxes of shoplifted goods than put yourself at risk of violence from either him or the state.)
Cops are better than prison guards, and for small crimes we should give them the latitude to be judge and jury.
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