As I recall a couple years ago he made public complaints that the prison had not yet given him a PlayStation 3 to replace his current PlayStation 2, because it offers more suitable games to his playing style. Probably has it now.

Punishment should fit the crime is the model in the US but since the 90s ever since sentencing became a political football that model has broken down.

I find that rehabilitation is a word that comes easy to people who have never been victims of an actual crime. Prison time should never be population control/engineering but it should be a deterrent.

Some people believe they help people imagine creative solutions.

I find counterfactuals, especially in history, to be devoid of any meaning and used by pseudo-intellectuals who don't really want to pursue the hard work of finding actual causality.

So, when someone asserts "Hitler caused Holocaust" some enterprising graduate student comes along and writes a thesis on Hitler's willing executioners and argues counterfactually that if Hitler wasn't there, Holocaust still happens.

That doesn't mean at all that Hitler did not cause Holocaust or that the "eliminationist antisemitism" German culture caused Holocaust. I wish you had chose a less value-laden example.

Using prisons as a warehouse for the mentally ill is another problem. These people should be handled differently than general population in a prison.

IMO, you go to prison to reflect on your choices, work on underlying issues and come out a stronger person. It's _very_ hard to do so with mentally ill roommates, rape, gangs, etc all around you.

I am a "victim" of an actual crime. My younger brother was hit by a car crossing the street. The driver was distracted and going >10 mph over the limit in a residential area. This individual had no insurance. No lawsuit was ever filed.

And the last people who should define punishments are victims of crimes, because our own instincts for revenge are wholly miscalibrated for modern society. I've had thousands of dollars of irreplaceable equipment stolen from me, some of which I designed myself, and yet I rationally accept that the perpetrators (never caught) shouldn't be strung up in the proverbial town square for all to see.

Until about two centuries ago, it was not all that common to imprison people as a punishment. It was mainly used to confine those awaiting trial, and to induce compliance (contempt of court, debtor prisons etc). Being convicted of an actual crime generally warranted some form or combination of fines, public shaming, corporal punishment, banishment, or execution.

Then, during the 17th century, the society had started to increasingly reject torture in general, and death penalty for relatively minor crimes (theft etc). Conveniently, that's also when European countries acquired sparsely populated lands that they wanted to settle ASAP, and so penal colonies were born, and replaced a significant chunk of previous death penalty convictions. That system eventually inspired the creation of proper prisons as we know them today.

Ironically, if you read about the prominent people behind the movement that made it happen, most of them subscribed to "prison as repentance" theory, rather than punishment. It's why it was seen as so progressive and radical for its day.

We all know how well that worked out.

Not in my experience. But that's just an anecdote and no doubt there is a lot of data backing your assertion. I also suspect that this is different for different countries.