The United States arrests and locks up scores of people, in fact, as reported by prisonpolicy.org, "a staggering 11 million people," cycle through the jail system, each and every year, from being arrested, to being incarcerated, to being in jail pending bail, for being held for trial, to violating probationary or parole terms and so forth, signifying that the jail and prison systems are used like an assembly line of allegedly bad people being put behind bars for some period of time, taking away freedom from millions. The very first problem with the criminal justice's treatment of those accused of breaking the law, besides all the convoluted, arbitrary, prejudicial and misapplied laws is the fact that for the masses, just about any offense against the state, results in some form of being put behind bars and thereby having to come up with some amount of money via bail, in order to release themselves from being in jail, and that is just the beginning of their troubles.
In point of fact, minor property based crime (such as petty theft, larceny) and victimless crime (prostitution, drugs), which doesn't involved violence or coercion, should be treated more akin to a traffic ticket, and should not necessitate the physical arrest and placement of the alleged perpetrator into jail. The basic point is the whole incarceration system should be significantly changed so as to go after violent criminals that are a true menace to society, and other criminals that are extracting large amounts of money through theft and robbery, whereas all the relatively minor stuff, or nuisances, should be treated in a manner commensurate with their so-called crimes.
What is really unfortunate about America, is that there is a huge division, between those that are on the street, committing various property and violent crimes, which are dealt with severely by the criminal justice system, and then there are crimes that are committed at truly astonishing levels of thought, corruption, gall, and the sheer amount of property stolen from the people which is all done under the cover and protection of the corporate flag, which, if dealt with, or if it is even discovered, entails typically no criminal time or criminal charges whatsoever, bargained monetary fines, and special under-the-table prosecutorial agreements, in which, the public is not privy to the true details of the deal, or even privy to exactly what transpired between the corporation and the crime that was committed which has seen been commuted to a monetary fine.
The biggest problem with allowing the people that run corporations, to hide their personal illegal anddisreputable actions behind the corporate entity, is that, knowing that they will never have to personally suffer the penalty for what they do, they are basically given carte blanche to do whatever that they are inclined to do, so as to increase profits, to "inadvertently" contaminate the environment, to obfuscate whatever, for they know that the worse case, is that they will pay a fine, and often the fine is less than the money that has been illegally extracted in the first place.
There are those that think fining corporations for their egregious bad behavior is enough, and the amounts as reported by the pliant press do appear to be huge, but there are two basic problems with this simplistic outlook; the first is that corporations state all of the time that raising their tax rate is pointless for all that means, in effect, is that they must raise their prices to recover that money lost, so that monetary fines, can be looked upon the same way, that it's simply the cost of doing business, and that rather than the corporations paying the fine, it's really the people that buy or utilize their products that do. The second thing is, there is an economic cost to crime, and millions of individuals go through that process each year, of which that negative economic impact to society is considerably less than the amount that is wrested away from the unsuspecting public by corporations fleecing them and knowing that even if they are caught, that the sanctions imposed upon them will be no worse than paying off the right prosecutorial authorities.
Basically, if you have larceny in your heart, but you're an individual and on the streets, if you get caught, you will do time, but if you work for a multi-billion dollar company, you will instead earn lots of money, promotions, bonuses, awards, and if you get caught, suffer a fine, akin to a ticket, and you will walk away, never having to appear in any form of the criminal justice system whatsoever.