It probably comes from America's largely Puritan upbringing. We have this intrinsic belief that how successful (in terms of power, money, respect, fame) you are is a reflection of how good a person you are, and if you are a bad person then you will get what's coming to you. And that these traits are basically innate, so someone who's bad is irredeemable, so we should minimize the harm they do to the good people, while if someone was good they wouldn't be in whatever bad situation they're in, or at the very least they would have already figured out how to get themselves out of it.

This is reflected in our means-testing for entitlements, for instance: if you can't find a job within a few months, you must be intrinsically lazy, and therefore don't deserve anymore handouts. So we cut off unemployment and food aid after a relatively short amount of time.

A lot of it I think is just sort of post hoc rationalization.

Following the civil war prisons were used as a back door replacement for slavery. There's a strong strain in America that My Money is worth more than Your Life which makes it intractable to spend enough to do prison "right". A general belief in a just world...

One day you wake up and realize what all this has lead to and because now the problem is so big you can only see two options: utter despair or figure out a way to pretend to yourself that this is what you want.

> Why do many US Americans think this way

It's certainly not specific to americans! I don't know about german jails, but in France they are notoriously bad and many people are totally fine with it.