America is a wrathful land. Americans like to humiliate wrongdoers. We like to heap marks of shame upon them, to watch them groan and writhe beneath their sins, as far back as the scarlet letter and the stocks. We like, in short, to punish. It makes us feel good. By every conceivable metric—prosecutions, duration of sentences, conditions of imprisonment—the United States is by far the most punitive rich democracy. No one else really comes close. And we are, of course, the only rich democracy that hands out the ultimate punishment: death.
