If those are indeed accurate numbers, then that doesn’t explain why the U.S. prison population as a percentage of the total population is so incredibly much higher than in almost any other country (and definitely any country that would be considered as having a functioning justice system), since Americans can’t be somehow genetically far more violent than other countries - this could be a consequence of failures of the public defender system and the prevalence of plea deals even for innocents, the fact that sentences in the U.S. tend to be arbitrarily long, leading to a large percentage of the prison population who would have already served their sentence in any civilized country, and a compounding of numerous smaller factors (some addressed in the comic already, some not). The point is, even if we were to count these statistics as valid for the comic world, most of the people here should not be here.

We cannot accept the use of real-world statistics for the comic world because this is clearly one where the worst tendencies of the real-world prison system have had time to run away and consume the entire thing - from what I can tell, the entire corrections side of things is heavily riddled with private companies in Sunjackers, and basically all prisoners are shipped out to perform involuntary (slave) labour. Even in the real world, people who couldn’t pay their debts already make up a majority of the population of local and county jails, and the world of Sunjackers seems like one where this would be even more prevalent still, especially as I haven’t seen any division between the state and local/county level in the world of Sunjackers.

Given this set of circumstances, the presence of anyone on this train is extremely unlikely to be the result of them being a bad person, and hundreds upon hundreds of people should not suffer decades of torment or even death just so maybe a few isolated cases who may be present get caught up with them. Again, this violates the most basic principles of justice and human dignity. (I know they’re not humans here, but it applies equivalently.)