No straw man proposals for you to attack here; you need to look evaluate individual crimes and cases. Just pointing out a reported fact. There are of course myriad causes for the US’s anomalous position with respect to its incarceration rate compared to other nations’ reported rates and the most comparable English speaking countries.
1. The date is wrong. Possible when you could have under reporting in other countries like China Russia. But one can never prove or disprove this.
2. A very high capital punishment rate that reduces incarceration. The rate of capital punishment is typically very low when compared to incarceration rate. The best examples of a high capital punishment rate to incarceration rate would be Mao, Stalin and Hitler regimes with Hitler’s being the best for records. Today, we could have this in places like Sudan, Somalia, NK.
3. We have such a high rate of illegal alien migration that overflow prisons and makes up for the low native rate. This certainly is an important factor and would seem to reduce the US rate, but is it enough to substantially reduce it from its top position? The native Black incarceration rate in the US is much higher than the native White rate and US Black rate is much higher than rates for countries such as Nigeria.
4. Laws and law enforcement in the US is associated with longer sentencing for comparable crimes in other similar countries. This has been the most likely reason cited. Now, if the majority of citizens are satisfied with the fact that the US has tougher sentencing for comparable violations, that’s a decision based on hundreds of thousands of laws and regulations collectively made by the States and the nation. It’s just that people need to know the situation identify outliers and either accept them or change them. Maybe having long sentencing or stiff penalties for EPA and IRS violations, drug crimes is a good thing. Each violation or crime needs to be evaluated separately and especially when there is a disparity with world averages. When such a disparity exists, it might be good or bad; it all depends on the actual law/punishment. My point is that this needs to be up for review and discussion.
5. People in the US are inherently more predisposed to crime because of cultural factors. Difficult to prove. For example, homogenous societies such as Japan have low crime rates especially for things such as theft and cultural factors are often cited. Even if true, what can you do about it.
There are no broad solutions to this problem as you have alluded to with an across the board “moratorium on imprisonment”. However, we must realize that when people have their liberty taken away by the State, there needs to be a very thorough review of the necessity and appropriateness of penalty or incarceration. Our current position as #1 imprisoner suggests that a review is sorely needed.
'Land of the free' does not fluctuate with a prison count. It just is.