Everyone in prison lumped into one, followed by a story of men gang-raping a child. Then you deny making any conflation. Yet the conflation is plain to see, I bet a chimp could pinpoint it.
I'll bet that same chimp might have enough memory to notice that the OP of this thread routinely says that we should allow property owners to shoot any and all trespassers.
By that logic, a shop keeper might well have been "justified" (in McBeth's messed up world) to just shoot the shoplifter for "trespassing" since once he engages in crime he is no longer welcome on the property. But then he turns around and complains because the government might impose a 30 year sentence??
What this reeks of is a mentality that hates government and any sense of law and order while loving the idea of unbridled vigilantism.
It is reckless, dangerous, and juvenile position.
Your story about 4 guys that need to be incarcerated does nothing at all to negate solus' point that we have problematically high incarceration rates. Our incarceration rates are not higher due to the sort of individuals your story is about. You already know this, yet you disregard this fact which obviously makes any semblance of a point you might have had moot.
What I know is that the recreational-drug-legalization crowd likes to engage in presenting mythology as fact. They like to claim that we have huge numbers of peaceful, otherwise-law-abiding pot heads spending decades in prison for no other reason than they were caught with two joints.
I call utter crap on that claim because it isn't true. And until you can provide solid citations to demonstrate otherwise, the claim--directly made or inferred--is bunk.
It is true that a lot of prison inmates have a drug problem. That problem may well have helped contribute to the behavior that got them into prison. But the vast majority of folks in prison are there only after repeatedly violating the rights of others including through theft and violence.
Incarceration rates and sentences for DUI and white collar crimes like theft through fraud or deception are pathetically low.
We have a high incarceration rate because we have a segment of our population that likes to rob, rape, murder, and otherwise victimize their fellow men. It is one of the primary reasons we all here demand our rights to own, carry, and (heaven forbid it be necessary) use our firearms in self-defense.
Notice what happened in the early to mid 1990s in both graphs. Violent crime spiked; We the People got tired of the liberal soft-on-crime that had coddled criminals since the 60s and 70s (remember the SCOTUS even banning executions for season in that time frame?), and decided some folks needed to be isolated from society. By the late 90s that was having the effect of reducing violent crime. Versions of the 2nd graph that are more recent, show the continuing decline in violent crime from 2012 to the present.
Charles