The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners. Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

That term "lenient judges" has always struck me as odd. It is one of those expressions like "liberal media" that has found it's way into the language by constant repetition, and now it just rolls off people's tongues and is heard without question.