America has a massive amount of its citizens that on any given day are incarcerated, jailed, arrested, jailed without the means to make bail, on probation, on parole, under house arrest, or serving some sort of time through other means, such as community service. This would presuppose that America has a massive crime problem, and further to the point, based on the fact that in recent times, the amount of those that are being processed through the criminal justice system has increased substantially from all other previous eras, would indicate that the problem is both intractable and systemic.
Then again, in life, people and institutions find what they want to find, depending upon how things are structured, handled, and dealt with. So that, when victimless crimes, such as illicit drug usage, vagrancy, prostitution, drunkenness, gambling and the like are treated as an opportunity for the policing arm of the state to go into communities that are impoverished so as to thereby harass and arrest those that are denizens of those communities, that to a large extent are suffering from being impoverished, unemployed, ill educated, and devoid of opportunity as well as lacking in good, wholesome alternatives; it is not then too surprising to find that community members have gravitated to activities that the justice codes have deliberately criminalized, in which, subsequently they are going to suffer a lot more arrests within their community, mainly because the law is structured to specifically address their activities as being criminal.
On the other hand, there are all sorts of crime, or what should be classified as crime, committed at the highest level of governments as well as corporations, which is often treated in a wholly different way, in which, seldom are individuals held accountable and thereby incarcerated, and seldom are those corporations who commit these crimes, held to anything much more than being fined some sort of monetary amount. For instance, many in America, decry the illicit drug usage that is seen on the streets of America, of which the sellers of these illicit drugs, are subject to onerous incarceration sentences, upon conviction; whereas those pharmaceutical companies, that manufacture legal opiate drugs, seem not to care who and how people are prescribed these opiates, as long as their prescription sales and profits go up; so that they functionally turn a blind eye to those medical facilities and doctors that are essentially prescribing highly addictive opiates, willy-nilly, primarily so as to make good money from other people's legalized addiction.
Then, there are, for instance, certain petrochemical companies, that manufacture products that are legally sold throughout the land, but in the process of manufacturing those products, they pollute the surrounding land, air, and waters to such an extent that those that live in close proximity to those facilities, are harmed and thereby suffer toxic aftereffects that are detrimental to their good health; of which, because these companies are so large and so powerful, they delay and obfuscate justice to such a large extent, as well as through the usage of the revolving door of those that regulate them, that those that have been harmed, often have no real recourse, to be made whole, even if they could be.
In fact, psychologytoday.com, states, "According to the FBI, the annual cost of street crime is $15 billion compared to nearly $1 trillion for white-collar crime." Yet, the faces of those that are incarcerated are clearly those that are poor, ill educated, from dysfunctional families, and typically without hope or good opportunity. In truth, those that are the real criminals are the ones that cheat the system and the people on a massive scale, yet, they are seldom incarcerated because this country insists upon locking up primarily those that are defenseless and without the resources to fight the system, because it wants to misdirect the American people to believe that they should fear the poor and disenfranchised, whereas they really should fear those that are well above the law.