Why does the US have the highest prison rate in the world...?

Because we Americans are taught from an early age that instant gratification is more important than actually working towards a goal. As a nation, we are far too lenient on criminals, troubled children are coddled instead of disciplined, and pride and shame are almost non-existent here..

Because in america people are to lazy to analyze problems.

"We" rather throw money at something or throw it away. Like all these people talking about the capital punishment. That's not the answer. You have to ask why people or going down this route. It's the a cut and dry A B C 123 answer like people seem to want. Life is more complicated than that.

First of all we neglect the poor in the sense that we neglect the reasons why they are poor. Why some are ignorent etc. Giving someone some money is giving them a fish.

The root problem is greed and it's not the greed of the people doing the crime. It's corruption of government (who mismanage and/or steal money) and an ignorent public that demands stuff that don't work. Since officials depend on that ignorent public for votes they rather do what the ignorent public demands instead of what works. We have private companies and individuals who are making more progress in curving crime in the areas they work than the goverment does. What since does that make?

This is another very profitable venture for those who have connections. I have followed this storyline the number of prisons cannot keep up with the prisoner population. Private companies are now running the administration, day to day operation of prisons. The private operations are lucrative. For those companies that went public, the stock are soaring and proving to be safe investments. I wish I have connections for a business venture like this.

Lots of reasons, partly due to stupid laws about innocuous substances like marijuana...partly because we don't just kill our worst offenders. I once watched a documentary on the actual process of executing someone by lethal injections...takes forever to get there and then costs over $100,000.00.

Take a look at what we feed our children as far as media goes...horribly violent, even the cartoons. Our young people grow up immune to horror from violence because they've seen so much, so dramatized and blown way up in their faces on tv.

In my whole life I've seen only two dead people outside of coffins, mostly they were just still, very little blood. I'll see five times that many in just an evening of tv, and that doesn't even count the news...

Because laws, on all levels, are not being enforced.

Chaos divides.

elysa02: I really like your theory! It's spot on imo. The Constitution is a lie. Freedom is a lie. Bravery is a lie. It's nothing but a distraction to lure naive citizens from foreign nations to fuel American and British imperialism. Once immigrants have made the wrong choice and burned their bridges it's too late to turn back so they must face the beast head-on. Sadly, many do not know how to do it constructively and end up destroying their lives.

Simple answer, starts like this, we have 535 idiots we voted into office (congress) and 100 more into another house of congress(senate) that try their best to overlook the needs of this country, and to keep themselves from going crazy with absolute boredom from lack of responsibility, sit around and pass laws to make criminals out of the general population and separate us from our hard earned money.

As a result we have thousand of useless laws that serve no purpose except to send us to jail, and don't benefit the public one bit.

Because we don't have a high execution rate like China which has one of the highest execution rates in the world then sells the dead inmates organs.

When you execute most of the prisoners, you will have a low imprisonment rate.

I agree with Dresden... we over-legislate instead of educating people. Instead of teaching people to have some kind of human ethic or value, we pass a law and put all the "non-believers" away in prison. It's not a very good system.

b/c of the ideas we all get from movies, music, insane countries. the people out there mix it all up to make so insane crazy psycho idea. and b/c people out there know that the US has freedom so they think they can do anything they want too. and the basic-- people just have no respect, they do it for attention, or to be funny.

Because in our country it is better to imprison than to exterminate criminals, unlike other parts of the world. I can name other countries where three of the answers I read to your question would be punished by death of the offender.

I wonder if that is so bad...