The whole Defund The Police and Ending Prisons isn't about doing away with them altogether. The most radical leftist knows that would be stupid. But warehousing criminals, as they get more and more sociopathic/psychopathic, isn't a healthy system for a healthy society.

People want the visceral satisfaction of a just punishment, but that's a wasted opportunity. We have a person that has gone down a bad road, and we have the choice of helping them get back on track, or not. Society is improved with the latter, so shouldn't we adopt that strategy, rather than just punishing?

There are going to be people who are irredeemable, that's just reality. Serial killers, out-of-control psychopaths, child molesters, etc, can't be helped, and those people have to be warehoused. But most people can respond to rehabilitation, as prisons in Europe prove. Their recidivism rate is far, far lower than ours.

We have been doing the wrong things for many years, just because they look good in the media, or make ignorant voters feel good. In ALL things, we should be looking at what other nations are doing right, and start adopting those strategies. I'm sick of our country doing stupid shit, just because we've always done it that way, and it makes the worst people in America happy.

I remember once seeing a news story where someone who had just gotten out of prison murdered someone. People in the comments were saying he shouldn't have been let out. How after years in prison, of course he's going to be dangerous. Gotta love when the tough on crime people accidentally realize the futility of the prison system.

The goal SHOULD be to make criminals into productive members of society. Unfortunately, the actual goal in many places is to make criminals keep reoffending to make more money for the business of incarcerating people. Or sometimes the goal is just to punish, with no thought about the long-term utility. Some people just think some people deserve to suffer and don't care about the utility for society. It's the same reason they oppose social safety nets.

Restorative justice, and yeah it's a very valuable goal

Some people are just born evil. Or they're born with something broken in their brains that can never be fixed.

Go talk to some teachers. Ask them about the worst of the worst. You'll hear some stories.

You hear a lot about "the school to prison pipeline," but there are some kids that you can just look at them and say, "that kid is going to die in prison." I'm talking about kids that assault their teachers and other students. I'm talking kids that steal, lie, and manipulate people in cruel and vindictive ways. In some cases they make a game out of deliberately creating false allegations of inappropriate behavior on the part of their teachers. They actively seek to destroy lives. I'm talking about kids that go through every program and intervention, that receive every form of support and counseling imaginable. Kids that receive nothing but compassion, caring and understanding...and respond by treating other human beings as disposable garbage fit only for their amusement. It's a rare kid that is truly this evil, but there are some real monsters out there. Some people are just born evil. There are some people that will simply never see the humanity in other human beings. There is no amount of counseling or coaching that can fix such profoundly broken souls. The best we can do is to warehouse them, to lock them in a place with their own kind, where they'll never be able to hurt an innocent person ever again.

You cannot teach someone to have empathy. You cannot teach someone to care for other people. You either do, or you don't.