[tptacek]

According to Pfaff, It's mostly the middle (how aggressive --- and also how poorly allocated --- prosecutors are), and very little the latter (although sentences are clearly too long).

If we're comparing the US criminal justice system to other countries, another more fundamental problem we have is that we simply have more crime. Not "people are getting busted for weed" crime, but property crimes and violent crimes. That fact implicates a much broader spectrum of public policy critiques about the US than how we manage the criminal justice system.