ShermanPosting

The policing and prison system is a major contributing factor in my opinion.

In the US, there are many levels of overlapping decentralized police forces. On the state level you've got local city cops, county sheriffs office, state police, highway patrol. Then on the federal level you've got FBI, homeland security, ATF, ICE, CBP, DEA, Marshals, and I've probably missed some more.

In Australia, we have State police (For example, Western Australian Police (WAPOL) within the state. Whether you're a cop in a small town of 30 people, or on the murder squad, you're still WAPOL and fall under a common chain of command. The state police is centralized. That means there's much less room for baddies to move within the system freely, whereas in the US, a cop that gets fired from one place seemingly moves two towns over and gets another job with another department. While there is a sheriff's office, they don't carry guns and dont effect arrests, they manage the courts and do things like serve court documents. If the sheriffs need to, they call WAPOL for armed law enforcement.

At the federal level, there's the Federal police, that's it. Within states, the federal police manage interstate and international points of entry like airports, seaports, and other interstate nodes. The border force sometimes have guns, and they do have armed patrol ships, but mostly they work with state or federal police to interdict individuals at airports and such, or with the defence department to interdict boats at sea.

In the US, the prison system is all over the place, with private prisons, county jails, state prisons, federal prisons, etc.

In Australia, the prisons are all run by a seperate department, Department of justice (called corrective services in some states). This isn't law enforcement. It's all state-based, there are no federal prisons. If the AFP needs to house a prisoner, they send him to a state prison and the fed pays the bill.

This includes remand centers for pretrial detention, which are like county jails, but they are still run by the state.

In the US, quality of incarceration varies wildly from one prison to the next, and theres a financial incentive to keep people incarcerated.

In Australia, people conviced of serious crimes cannot vote in elections while they are in prison, but when released, their right to vote returns automatically, immediately.

In the US, the disenfranchisement of incarcerated people varies wildly, with many felons being unable to vote after release until after a certain period has elapsed (seperate from parole), OR on explicit petition of the governer, OR in some cases, they can never vote again. So therefore, punishment effectively continues even after a sentence has been completed.

The US justice system is a wild, convoluted, decentralized mess, everyone has guns, and there is no incentive to reform prisoners but a political incentive to disenfranchise as many as possible.