My guess would be that most developed countries see prison not as a revenge but as the start to learn to function in society. America's system is more or less all about revenge.
That doesn’t make sense. Building a prison in itself doesn’t induce crime nor does it induce prison sentences. Judges and juries have no quotas to fill based on vacancy.
https://www.npr.org/2022/08/18/1118108084/michael-conahan-ma...
Some private prison corporations and judges both felt it was profitable enough. Two Pennsylvania judges received $2.8M in bribes from private prisons to send 4,000 kids to the private prisons with long sentences; apparently ruining 4,000 kids lives was profitable enough to justify $2.8M in bribes. One of the judges has managed to get released early.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2011/08/11/139536686...
https://boingboing.net/2013/08/06/judge-who-accepted-private...
E.g., private prisons likely spend at least as much in legal lobbying efforts to maintain high prison populations as they do in bribes.
If you accept the idea of the "war on drugs", it also goes for drug offenses: by putting drug dealers behind bars, you prevent people from buying drugs and harming themselves.
I don’t think it’s a right way of framing it. It’s not about acceptance. If you look at the statistics on consumption, harm suffered from abuse or how the illegal trade is doing between highly repressive countries and countries which have legalised drugs or don’t jail consumers but try to help them kick their addiction, you can factually say that the “war on drugs” is an abject failure leading to more harm than good like prohibition before it.
The 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs is probably the most harmful thing the USA ever did to the world.