That's true for some of them. There's also a very large number of people in prison who are legitimately good people, but made a mistake at some point or got pushed into a situation where they didn't have many good options. There are plenty of people who have no desire to commit any crime and won't once they're let out. A big problem is that prison is a black hole that's hard to return from, part of which is due to society's perception of everyone who gets locked up and the mental wasting away and lack of development once you're in there.

On the other hand, if you make reintegration to society impossible, and eventually release prisoners... you know the outcome you're going to get.

Plenty of societies appear to do much better than the US at preventing recidivism and reforming criminals to productive members of society.

I remember a common saying that's bandied about Hacker News: a 10x quantitative difference is a qualitative difference.

Well, America's violent crime rate is 10 times higher than Europe's violent crime rate, so make of that what you will.

Parse attempt: there are too significant systemic, social differences to meaningfully compare process&results between countries.

Half the point is that systemic differences contribute to different outcomes, so lets change the system. What a sad rejoinder to argue that the system is a force of nature.

Some bits of the system we can change with effort. Urban poverty, etc, can improve. We can have a better criminal justice system.

Some are cultural bits in subpopulations that are resistant to change; we can work on it, but it's not clear how much of an effect any intervention will have.

There's some other structural ones that will be extremely difficult to change-- we have the some of the most dangerous places in the world next-door in Latin America.

There's a lot more evidence for rehabilitation than there is for mass incarceration with brutal staff.

There are of course some people who are so dangerous, so relentlessly violent, that they can never be released from prison. Does that mean we should be brutal to those people for all the years they're in prison? Why? What's that going to achieve? It doesn't stop them being violent, and it may well escalate their dangerous harmful behaviour in prison.

It seems likely enough that they believe that nurturing, opportunity and understanding are going to contribute to building a new worldview.

I mean, you aren't going to build trust by treating people poorly.