There are different models for incarceration — retribution, rehabilitation, threat reduction. Retribution serves no purpose at all. Rehabilitation is far more successful outside of a prison. The only acceptable reason to imprison someone is to protect society, to keep people who are truly a great danger to others segregation so they can’t victimize anyone else. It should be limited primarily to violent offenders.
A new report from the Brennan Center for Justice concludes that “unnecessary incarceration” — imprisoning people for low-level offenses and keeping them there for years — is ruining hundreds of thousands of lives, wasting billions of dollars and having little effect on public safety.
If you’ve been following the debate over mass incarceration in the United States, these arguments sound familiar. The U.S. is home to 5 percent of the world population but nearly a quarter of the world’s prisoners. Roughly 2.2 million Americans are behind bars, giving us the highest incarceration rate of nearly any country in the world. 222 Countries Listed, USA is #2
[prisonstudies.org]