(Now I'll get responses telling me how some people are unjustly incarcerated. You missed the point)
That's something we've got to fix. But just because that happens, it doesn't mean we don't have to be hard on "not elite" criminals.
>If punishment was applied uniformly, maybe you'd have more people respecting the law?
I don't believe so. You think crack dealers, murderers or rapists do their thing because Mr. Richguy didn't go to prison for stealing a few millions? I don't see how those two things are related at all.
Maybe the case of some anarchist terrorists who wanted to sow discord through crime, but that's a tiny minority.
If you wrote an algorithm, then some tests, and your tests showed it failed 76% of the time, do you really think you'd look at that and think: "great, it's working, so let's do more of that?" If so, I doubt you'd be long for the world of paid employment. Yet that's exactly what you're advocating here. Assuming, that is, your goal is to reduce crime.
Let's re-frame the conversation. If 76% of high school students failed to graduate, would you point at that and say the kids are scum, failures, it's their fault they couldn't hack it? Clearly the system works. Here's a pick-axe and a hard hat, good luck with your future in the coal mines. Or would you say hmm, clearly there's room for improvement in the way we teach people or the things we teach? Let's figure out how to fix this.
Now if you just want an institutionalized way to abuse people, it definitely fits the bill.
[1] https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/recidivism-am...
Does being hard mean scamming them? Because that's what we're talking about here, not about applying longer sentences or other harsh punishments.
In short, the US prison population is sufficiently skewed away from justice that holding incarceration against someone is disingenuous.
Law only works when the transgressors are few. When the law is at odds with society, society adopts to being at odds with the law. If one truly believes in the rule of law, then it behooves them to reject nonsensical applications of it that undermine its credibility.
Some of them have disrespect for some laws, which can be entirely reasonable and not make them lesser at all.
Some of them were desperate.
Very few fall into the bucket you described.