Exactly. The criminal justice system is designed to control people who have something to lose. The penalties they can apply have far less impact on people with very little to lose. For some reason, not much airtime is devoted to discussing how we could motivate people to obey the law by giving them something to lose.

That's not hard to understand for a few reasons. First, it's not a simple 10 second sound bite, it doesn't get ratings. Second, a lot of people don't want to hear it, they're still into the fantasy of "bootstraps" for everyone. Finally, the vast majority of media is owned by large companies who want no part in spreading such a message even if it did get ratings and appealed to their audience.

Which it doesn't.

Very true, but that's even more of a nuanced and difficult long-term project, and too often it's easy for politicians to frame it as "soft on crime". For better or worse people really resent seeing criminals enjoy a standard of living that even begins to approach their own. That's another reason to raise the general standard of living, because until you do, people will just think in terms of, "Well I had it worse."

And in making people better off, you're also raising the downside to crime, because of all the nice things people have that they wouldn't get in prison.