No, the legal system in the US absolutely does not have the resources to give a jury trial to everyone charged with a crime.
"According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (2005), in 2003 there were 75,573 cases disposed of in federal district court by trial or plea. Of these, about 95 percent were disposed of by a guilty plea (Pastore and Maguire, 2003). While there are no exact estimates of the proportion of cases that are resolved through plea bargaining, scholars estimate that about 90 to 95 percent of both federal and state court cases are resolved through this process (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2005; Flanagan and Maguire, 1990)."
"...Plea bargaining results in disparate treatment concerning both legal and extralegal characteristics, especially regarding those who are more likely to be granted lenient sentences."
> What's the alternative? Someone commits a felony, and then you...?
The US is the OECD country with the highest per capita % of incarcerated individuals. By orders of magnitude. So it seems other countries have found other approaches?
> Source: Half of the OECD countries have less than 100 people in prison
per 100 000 inhabitants. Thirteen have between 100 and 200. Two
countries exceed this – Poland with 230 and the United States with
more than 700. The US rate is the highest in the world followed
by Russia with about 600 per 100 000 inhabitants. Except in the
United States imprisonment rates for women are negligible.
Not locking them in cages. The US locks up people at 10X the rate of every peer nation, literally. By my logic, this implies 90% should be free right now, via one mechanism or another.
