Question

How can the United States justify that we only have 5% of the world's population, yet incarcerate 25% of the world's prisoner?

Answer 1

While the US has just 5% of the overall world population, it has almost 25% of its prisoners, nearly 2.2 million prisoners.
In the past 4 decades, jails and jails have been crammed into rubble by the country's tough-on-delinquency policies, often of poor, uneducated citizens of colour.

The US had a fairly healthy prison population for decades. In the late sixties and early seventies it was modified. Some causes have included an spike in illegal activity from the 60s to the 80s; growing fears about smoking cocaine and other substances leading to a significant rise in drug sanctions; the switch to mandatory minimum penalties; and other strict measures, such as 'three-strikes' laws and initiatives to ensure that inmates are completing at least 85% of their sentences. Such strict rules on sentences along with the dramatic rise in the amount of drug punishment brought in a 1.5 million state and federal inmates, up from 200000 in 1973. It will not involve almost 750,000 People per day in jails and almost 13 million total inmates.

This development has been unprecedented and historically unparalleled in the United States.