Depending on the kind of damage a given person may do when not in prison, the cost of keeping said person in-prison may be cheaper than the damage they do to society. For example, an arsonist that just burns down buildings for the lawls, it is cheaper to keep them contained in some fashion.
Now, do we need to rework how our prison and penal system work overall? For sure! Once you have a felony on your record, you are a pariah within society and it makes it much harder to start over. As well, how we deal with mental health issues still seems less-than-ideal.
But we still have yet to figure out how to differentiate between someone that tries to do better after 1 bad decision/mistake or someone that keeps being a drain on society (due to continued criminal activity). We tried the 3-strike model, that that doesn't seem to have worked out great. I honestly don't know of good approaches here.
Now, do we need to rework how our prison and penal system work overall? For sure! Once you have a felony on your record, you are a pariah within society and it makes it much harder to start over. As well, how we deal with mental health issues still seems less-than-ideal.
But we still have yet to figure out how to differentiate between someone that tries to do better after 1 bad decision/mistake or someone that keeps being a drain on society (due to continued criminal activity). We tried the 3-strike model, that that doesn't seem to have worked out great. I honestly don't know of good approaches here.