> You are free to disagree and be in the moral wrong,
The reason I posted is because you seemed to be unaware other people have different moral value systems. This is the fundamental reason behind a lot of disagreements. Here's the root of it: you think I a morally wrong and I think I am morally right. There is no rational argument to demonstrate that either of us are correct.
That's also why you're fundamentally unpersuasive. You're not convincing anyone by making bald assertions of your unsupported moral beliefs.
> the wrong side of history.
History will go on for a long time, and there is no arc of some sort of moral progress, just shifting social norms changing with historical accidents. This type of argument is particularly unpersuasive and tends to raise people's hackles immediately, because it's a declaration that you are (again, without evidence) so incredibly righteous that history itself will steamroll people who disagree with you.
> There are good examples of much better humanitarian penal systems with far better outcomes in Scandinavian countries that demonstrate this reality well.
The better outcomes may have nothing to do with the nature of the penal system itself, but wider cultural differences. In fact, this seems much more likely, given the extant differences in US subcultures and demographics. Slicing up the US crime data by economic quintiles and various demographics gives the lie to a lot of arguments. Even excluding the wider cultural comparison, talking about this without evaluating the commonalities between the crimes in questions and aggravating factors between the two countries makes this a really apples-to-oranges comparison.