I agree that lengthy imprisonment should be very rare, certainly for a much smaller proportion of crimes than it is currently used in the US. The current US sen

I agree that lengthy imprisonment should be very rare, certainly for a much smaller proportion of crimes than it is currently used in the US. The current US sentencing system is geared towards very high sentences though (anomalously high by just about any standards except perhaps China's). So it would require a fairly major reform to fix. Right now if anyone is convicted of a felony in a federal court it's really easy for the sentencing range to be decades, which is made worse by the fact that there are really a lot of federal felonies (and some of them are broadly written). One of the political/philosophical reasons is that the U.S. seems fonder than many countries of a retribution-based model of justice, where the goal of imprisoning someone is not only to protect society and dissuade future would-be criminals, but to "punish" them in a metaphysical sense. Many European countries have shifted in the past half-century to a more utilitarian model, in which the goal of the prison system is seen as almost purely targeted at reducing crimes. From that perspective, imprisoning people for particularly long periods of time often doesn't end up as a very appealing solution, admittedly depending strongly on how you weight factors.