They should. I don't think this is something I'm willing to change my mind on.
Prisons are literally one of the worst things we've made. They serve no purpose other than to dehumanize, rape, assault, and other fucked shit to "undesirables." It allows us to put problems to be solved to a later date, instead of addressing them head on and making sure it doesn't happen.
Prison should be an optional rehabilitation option for people, with it potentially being forced on a very very small minority of the population. No more than 0.01% of the population should be in forced rehabilitation, and no more than 1% in optional rehabilitation.
Prisons exist primarily to control threats from society. And secondarily to punish people for getting caught breaking rules, partially for vengeance and partially for deterrence.
Societies have tried other methods of controlling threats beyond imprisonment, including (but definitely not limited to) ankle bracelets, public shaming, shunning, exile, offender registries, altering brains via chemicals, brainwashing, torture, or surgery, altering bodies via sterilization or mutilation, death, even collective punishment.
So prisons aren't great, but they're better than many of the alternatives.
On a personal note: that crime of any kind is even possible in a 100% controlled environment speaks to the malicious incompetence of those administering the prisons, and to our shameful collective thirst for vengeance. As with people, judge a society by how they treat the least powerful.
It's very much the other way around. Prisons exist primarily to punish, and secondarily for isolation. But they were originally - as a concept - intended to be about rehabilitation. The end result is something that doesn't rehabilitate, is a very expensive way to punish someone in a way that makes it hard to control the severity of the punishment, and does a lot more than what's needed for simple isolation.
On top of all that, it gets severely overused, not the least because of this broad assumption that it's "better than many of the alternatives", even when that's not actually true - in many cases, prison sentences that replaced one-off corporal punishments for minor crimes can be a lot more disruptive for the life of the person undergoing them.
The societal failings like prisons existing in the first place? The police and courts who supply a steady stream of fodder to the prison-industrial complex? The legislators who create innumerable and overbroad laws to give the above carte blanche to abuse vulnerable groups?
By all means, let us get rid of all of these things.
> The societal failings like prisons existing in the first place?
Prisons existing is not a societal failure. You can't have a society with 330 million people and not have at least 1 murderer who is relentlessly violent, who needs to be physically confined to protect everyone around them. As soon as you have 1 individual like that (which is almost guaranteed by the law of large numbers irrespective of how good that society is), you've already agreed that some kind of prison (whether or not you label it as such) is necessary.
Every large country has some kind of supermax prison, including Scandinavian countries, because it's a simple reality that individuals like the above exist in small numbers.
When that inevitably fails, where do you put the unrepentant rapist, if not in a prison? This is a simple question, if you find yourself unable to answer it, it's because your proposal is moronic.
You might want to look at the historical status quo before prison - I highly doubt you would approve of public floggings, mutilations, and quickly carried out (from trial at least) executions. Prison requires cheap enough food or a high ransom to be viable as an institution to allow keeping them working and some means of ensuring they cannot escape or fight successfully - potentially guards as well.
It can be a historical running dark joke - "Sadly <x> still qualified as an improvement." such as slavery technically being a bit better than early human warfare ending in genocide either directly or indirectly (forced out of all territory capable of sustaining themselves).
That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do better (ones with far better recidivism rates should be a model for one) but given the history it isn't a failing in itself - that would suggest a shift away from widespread killing and mutilating people was a mistake.
If you look at California, for example, you can literally verify that many registered sex offenders live just a few blocks away from any given person. The thing with prison mentality is that people forget that most crimes don't carry life sentences and that ex-cons eventually go back to the streets.
So the question becomes how do you reconcile the secretly dark desire to wipe undesirables off the face of the earth forever vs a legal system that says that people do have the right to live normal lives after they've paid their debts to society. There isn't really a viable middle ground here. The current status quo is to just spend ungodly amounts of tax dollars deferring the dilemma to X years in the future. But when the time is up, either you wait for a relapse and go through the whole thing again, or you just accept that society wants undesirables banished and just kill them all all the time to free resources, or you come up with some reasonable reintegration strategy where people are ok living near ex-cons. Most people would probably balk at the idea of unconditional life/death sentences, under some tautological idea of justice. You can see small scale cases where reformed murderers claim to have found god and built families, and whatever. The challenge is that there's a lot of very strong stigma as soon as you leave tight social circles and that's where the relapses often come from.
It does answer your question: you kill them (e.g. law systems that stone them to death) or reintegrate them into society or just keep doing the prison/release/relapse dance indefinitely, burning through tax dollars all the while.
You may put a rapist in a prison but then they serve their sentence and might go on to become your neighbor, regardless of whether they repent or are willing to rape again. Where do you put them then? Who gets to decide who's unrepentant? You see how the question gets uncomfortable?
I get that you're trying to just imply that some criminals should just rot in prison, but that's exactly the blindsidedness that I was talking about when it comes to discussions about prison systems.
I can see you're not taking this conversation seriously, since your proposal would entail a massive increase in executions, which I know you do not seriously desire. You know, as well as I do, that justice systems make mistakes. I do not have to explain to you that an innocent man can be released from prison, but cannot be unexecuted. You know this, yet I bring it up anyway because you insist on pretending to be a moron.
By all means, let us get rid of all of these things.
Unfortunately the American people voted otherwise. See what Harris was up to in CA. Expect it to be rolled out nationwide. Biden created the laws that made it possible. They are a right pair.
This is typically what "tough on crime" means in the US. Not that they will catch violent criminals faster or better, but they will prosecute minor crimes as if they were violent crimes. It's how many politicians leverage the fear of crime to get elected.
Our criminal justice system is broken where innocent people should fear getting incarcerated because: 1. Almost everything is a crime and 2. Every crime is prosecuted harshly for political points. (look at me, I'm tough on crime, I imprisoned 300 criminals).
As an European the United States needs proper reform of its judicial/law system, or whatever you call the dreadful thing where you can imprison a person for 10 years because of non-violent property crime. Unfortunately I've read that the new VP had built her career partially on being tough on crime, hope that those people were wrong/lying or (if they were correct) that she'd be able to see that that's not the best road going forward.
They should. I don't think this is something I'm willing to change my mind on.
Prisons are literally one of the worst things we've made. They serve no purpose other than to dehumanize, rape, assault, and other fucked shit to "undesirables." It allows us to put problems to be solved to a later date, instead of addressing them head on and making sure it doesn't happen.
Prison should be an optional rehabilitation option for people, with it potentially being forced on a very very small minority of the population. No more than 0.01% of the population should be in forced rehabilitation, and no more than 1% in optional rehabilitation.