That, as a person from a nordic country, sounds like a very American take. At least over here, the point is to make the people be in a state where criminal behavior isn't desirable. Coming out of a sentence with debt (unrelated to the reason you were there) seems counterproductive.
Voting patters. Americans, like any human, loooove righteous violence, both witnessing and enacting it. The System in America is Americans' collective expression of this impulse.
