Bingo!

What kind of alternative do you imagine? A world where the police arrest every criminal once and they're done?

There are few jobs on Earth where you fix everything once and it stays fixed forever. Almost everyone is working to keep a type of entropy at bay. Doctors help people get healthy who get sick again, I fix outages that will get caused again, and police need to arrest people who do crimes and will get released again.

I expect there to be a consequence given for breaking the law. That's the "radical" alternative I imagine. Instead we get a release directly after offense.

If you go see a doctor to help you get healthy, and you feel better right after, but the very next day you're sick with the same condition, do you think the doctor really helped?

"Why am I putting out this wildfire? A new one is just going to start later. It's pointless to fight these fires when year after year they just keep coming back".

It's the job they chose and trained to do. If they don't like it, they can get a new job.

That is a terrible analogy.

Someone is starting these fires. The police go in and take care of it, the DAs literally release them with zero or nearly zero consequences to the offender and the next day (often literally) they are starting "fires" again.

We are human, not machines, we are not idealized automatons.

"year after year"? People have gotten arrested and then released to commit more crimes with a turnaround of less than a day. It'd be fantastic if they all got even 1 year in prison. A better analogy would be that there's no sense wasting a small handheld fire extinguisher on a large wildfire.