Comment by gottorf

It's widely known that drug offenses are easier ways to stick criminals (who perpetrate crimes other than drug offenses) in prison, analogous to how in the end they convicted Al Capone of tax evasion. There is no epidemic of mere consumers of controlled substances going to prison, at least not in the past decade or longer.

Besides, you can look at the straightforward statistic of homicides to gauge the overall criminality of a population. The US has a homicide rate an order of magnitude higher than its peer countries. By this measure, the US actually has an under-incarceration problem, not one of over-incarceration. Wikipedia has the US incarceration rate at 542 per 100k, compared to Sweden at 92, Switzerland at 77, or South Korea at 115; compare that to the intentional homicide rates of the US at 5.763 per 100k, Sweden at 0.867, Switzerland at 0.504, and South Korea at 0.489. If incarceration scaled with the homicide rate, those other countries are actually much more prison-heavy than the US!