If you value societal order above all else, then you want extremely horrific punishments for crimes, you want near-absolute certainty that you'll be punished for criminal acts, and you want capture and trial to be swift, so that people know that breaking the law results in:
Swift capture
Swift trial
Swift execution
And with those three things, you get a highly ordered, law-abiding society, because it becomes common knowledge that breaking the law results in death, guaranteed, so unless you're just stupid or insane, you don't break the law.
If you don't value that kind of clockwork societal order, then you get... Western civilization.
Frankly I'll take the chaos of our Western civilization over the stifling draconian societal order of places like Singapore any day of the week.
> If you value societal order above all else, then you want extremely horrific punishments for crimes, you want near-absolute certainty that you'll be punished for criminal acts, and you want capture and trial to be swift, so that people know that breaking the law results in:
You're ignoring the issue of which acts are criminalized.
The United States incarceration rate is 4x higher than of the rest of the world, in part because it hands out much longer sentences than most other countries. You're not wrong, but it's still the US that is the outlier in terms of sentence lengths [1].
The US is wholly inefficient with the Death Penalty, so I'm against it from a purely financial point of view. By the time many cases get to a point of being convicted they will have already served years, maybe even a few decades in prison already.
And yes, there is the open secret that the US uses its prison system as a form of soft slave labor. Many people don't want to reduce that supply.
