> I’m not really clear how this restraining order helps what you’re describing. Do you support the ability of the police to impose jail time in a way that circumvents the (elected) prosecutor’s office?

There are absolutely better policies. The injunctions are an act of desperation in the face of a mounting death toll.

> > If you compare person prison years, the U.S. is an extreme outlier. However, by prison admittances per year, we're actually not extreme at all, even compared to Europe.

> This is factually wrong. It entirely hinges on extremely warped interpretation of data that can only be generated by a person or organization that starts with a desired version of reality and works backward to justify that position.

Care to point out how its factually wrong. (EDIT: I said person years, but I meant per capita. But if you're even the least bit charitable it's the same thing.) For the record I'm not reciting some Heritage Foundation policy paper. In fact, I discovered this factoid on a whim as it occurred to me that the incarceration rate metric was ambiguous. In doing so I found only a single partisan research paper, which hasn't seem to garnered any attention. I also went back into some criminal justice literature I've read over the years and was also surprised to see this gap--plenty of scholars have pointed out issues with the severity of U.S. sentencing, but don't seem to have given much analysis to this particular aspect of the data. I also have a formal legal education and likewise don't remember anyone pointing out this distinction--professors and law students alike never seemed to appreciate that there might anything meaningful about the details of the popular metric, probably because for the past 20 years the narrative regarding the need for criminal justice reform has been largely universally accepted across the political spectrum, at least in academia--there was no disputing that too many people were in jail.

Prison admittance data exists, however, from various primary government sources in both the U.S. and Europe; it just hasn't been assembled properly for convenient, comparative consumption. If I was a paid researched I would absolutely spend the time to assemble it properly and make the case. Instead I spent one night on it and, well, I can't even say I was convinced of anything--it's just a simple matter of numbers. If you give a moments thought, the metric is problematic, and when you look at the admittance numbers there's simply nothing to seriously dispute. There's inconsistency regarding whether pretrial detainment is included in various statistics--for many, it seems to be included, but I can't confidently say that's true for all the sources I found. That said, countries, like France, have pretrial detainment rates similar to the U.S; and even in the most pessimistic scenario least favorable to the U.S., admittances couldn't even begin to create a gap of the size the U.S. has regarding per capita--at best a fractional difference, not large multiples!

It's also entirely intuitive and sensical when you stand back and look at things. Consider that in most countries, especially in Europe and the Americas, murder has a maximum penalty of 20 years jail time. In the U.S. life sentences are not uncommon. And consider the effect of things like three-strikes laws, which during the 1990s and early 2000s could turn a serious of felonies into life sentence. Or drug laws--if someone spends a year in the U.K. for a drug offense (not a real figure), but 5 years in the U.S., it's not at all surprising that per capita incarceration for drug offenses would be 3-5x greater in the U.S. even when both the U.K. and the U.S. have the same jail sentencing rate for drug offenders.

When judging per capita (which is absolutely the metric used in all public policy discussion numbers, and absolutely the one used for the infamous 7x outlier statistic), the incarceration rate is undeniably horrible. There's also an obvious curve that matches the history of the most recent "tough on crime" phase. By this unit the U.S. peaked at 7x about a decade ago, but today is now down to around 4x. However, prison admittances have remained much more consistent, at least on average across the country. There's are definitely some interesting questions regarding relative effects of absence of prosecution vs lighter sentencing, and how it might relate or not relate to policies preferences between, say, SF and Texas, but for a first-order approximation and in the context of the magnitude of the huge per capita incarceration rate discrepancy between the U.S. and elsewhere, it's all really irrelevant. The takeaway is that the primary factor in the unacceptably high per capita incarceration rate in the U.S. is duration of sentencing, not the prevalence of incarceration as a penalty.