[evmaki]

US incarceration rates increased 500% in the decades following the enactment of war on drugs legislation, starting with the Controlled Substances Act in 1970.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...

More speculatively, I think the prison system has also taken over the role of the mental health institutions that were wound down under Reagan. Over half of the incarcerated population has a mental health condition, and likely are not receiving adequate mental health care while incarcerated.

[metalcrow]

You actually seem to have a compelling case here. I am seeing something like 20% of the combined state and federal prison population is in for drug offenses, but that raises some more questions. I could certainly believe that a lot of that is simple possession and the US is uniquely terrible in that regard, but certainly other countries must handle drug dealers as well. And it's hard to break out drug offenses into more detail. Are we talking kilograms of possession? Distributing drugs? (of course, some laws claim that possession, say, 10 grams implies intent to distribute which complicates things).

And even outside of drugs, while 20% of our prison population does account for a large chunk of the us's exceptional nature, it would still leave us #1 by a large margin if it didn't exist. Although Wikipedia does talk about another part of this is due to the _length_ of the US sentences, and how they are much longer on average then other countries, so that also contributes significantly.