"The percentage of criminals in the United States"
Like I said, drawing and inference from the two stats you posted is disturbing because both of those stats say nothing of the actual amount of valid criminals/lawbreakers.
Why are Americans so criminal? More than Iran, China, Russia, Syria, Saudi Arabia.... Why is it that Americans can't follow the rules? What is wrong with them?
Of course that assertion is absurd because, at its foundation, that logic gets very racist very fast.
Not sure how this is really an additional fact. If you defined criminals in the sense of "criminals as defined in the US", you have almost by definition a direct correlation to the number of prisoners.
BTW, here in Germany we also have politicians who think that Europe's criminals concentrate in Germany. Probably every country has some people believing that all criminals come to them. The difference between countries is how much influence those voices have.
Often, the DA will structure a plea bargain on drug or weapons posession (over a long list of more serious charges) because those are very easy to prove.
This idea that the prisons are full of good guys caught up in the system is detached from reality. Most guys doing hard time are guilty of about twenty other things that they haven't been prosecuted for.
Furthermore black offenders receive sentences that are longer than white offenders - http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873244320045783044...
And white people are significantly less likely to be arrested for drug possession, despite usage rates being fairly similar - https://www.aclu.org/news/new-aclu-report-finds-overwhelming...
A prisoner deserves to be sentenced for the crime they were convicted of, not for any possible crimes that we think they may have committed. To behave otherwise is completely antithetical to a society that supposedly values justice
So no, prisons aren't "full of good guys", but they're full of people serving sentences that are longer than any rational policy would dictate who have been prosecuted in a system that has been shown time and again to have deep issues with bias and inequality.
Not to mention the violence and overcrowding endemic in the prison system. It should be a source of national shame that it has continued this long without real reform.
This is an oft repeated lie. Blacks use narcotics at well over double the white rate. Claims that rates are similar are based on surveys, as opposed to test data.
Anyway, you are missing the point here that prosecutors know exactly who they're convicting. Sentences now are almost all plea bargains. They get serious criminals to plea out on narcotics charges rather than go to court and face the full set of charges and a 25 year sentence. They don't even bother prosecuting some kid with some drugs. This is how the system works. It may be problematic, but it's not as broken as naive people assume.
System works to what end ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
IF this was true, we would see a correlation between gun ownership (or access) and murder rates. If anything, the correlation is slightly negative, both in the US and globally.
Where you DO see the correlation is inequality. In US states, using data from wikipedia, I find a 70% correlation between gini coefficients and homicide rates. The same is true globally.
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and...
There is a correlation, albeit a negative one:
http://www.theacru.org/harvard_study_gun_control_is_counterp...
The study, which just appeared in Volume 30, Number 2 of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy (pp. 649-694), set out to answer the question in its title: “Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International and Some Domestic Evidence.”
The findings of two criminologists – Prof. Don Kates and Prof. Gary Mauser – in their exhaustive study of American and European gun laws and violence rates, are telling:
Nations with stringent anti-gun laws generally have substantially higher murder rates than those that do not. The study found that the nine European nations with the lowest rates of gun ownership (5,000 or fewer guns per 100,000 population) have a combined murder rate three times higher than that of the nine nations with the highest rates of gun ownership (at least 15,000 guns per 100,000 population).
For example, Norway has the highest rate of gun ownership in Western Europe, yet possesses the lowest murder rate. In contrast, Holland’s murder rate is nearly the worst, despite having the lowest gun ownership rate in Western Europe. Sweden and Denmark are two more examples of nations with high murder rates but few guns.
Without knowing exactly what they considered homicide and what they considered a firearm related homicide, these numbers are meaningless. Only a few years ago the CDC released a large study where they choose to define a female forcing a male to penetrate as not being rape, thus resulting in very different statistics about rape than had the definitions been the more common 'non-consensual sex' or such.
In the last 20 years they have stopped giving ammunition to keep with your military rifle, exactly because they started having problems with shootings. Switzerland is the worst possible "example" of gun ownership reducing violent crime.
Along the same lines of reasoning as yours, approximately 1/2 our murders are committed by black Americans, and the proportion of people who are black are well correlated with murders. So one could equally well say that the murder rate is high because of the presence of black people. Would you endorse this conclusion? If not, why not?
(Let me emphasize I'm not endorsing the conclusion I derive here - I simply plan to repeat whatever argument jaquesm has against the above conclusion back at him w.r.t. guns.)
Note however that this is wild speculation, just things you have to take into account.
In the United States, there are 487,000 incarcerated awaiting trial [1].