Penological question for Americans.

Murder, rape and arson committed against an occupied building deserve a life sentence.
None of this ‘good behavior’ nonsense. If you did that stuff once you are messed up in the head and not reliable in a lawful society.

Bring back road crews and prison shops, force the convicts to earn their supper, commissary and T.V. privileges.

Be harsh on the predatory animals inside. We send young people to prison for low level crimes like auto theft or selling weed and they come out so abused that they are ticking time bombs.

Consider decriminalizing all dope. If a person wants meth, heroin or crack a cheaper option is right under the kitchen sink in a big plastic jug…Mazel Tov, stop screwing up our hard earned operation, most of us are busting our asses out here.

Illegals need to be sent back to where they came from, you wait your turn like everybody else to get here.
NO shortcuts.

I agree with what you wrote. It's a business first and then punishment. Mass incarceration started after slavery as a backdoor way to continue slavery. The 13th amendment didn't outlaw slavery - just limited it to prisoners. Black men were arrested for minor reasons and then sentenced to years of free labor often times to their former masters.

Recent mass incarceration started in the 70s with Nixon to destroy the civil rights and social movements. It was called the war on drugs, but really used to jail black people and hippies. 196,429 prison rate in 1970 to 2.3 million in 2022.

There is prison labor in which private companies and local governments profit from prison labor. Privately-run prisons need long sentences and many prisoners for profit so arrests and harsh sentences are encouraged. Lives are ruined when former prisoners can't get jobs, apartments or benefits because of their record. It's also voter suppression.
https://www.vox.com/2015/7/13/8913297/mass-incarceration-maps-charts

Our society is diseased. Our cult of rugged individualism & rampant greed leading to massive inter-generational inequality & poverty has created a cultural & economical wasteland. The schools & prisons are where it all lands.

Slightly pat answer, but we're well broke. All you have to do is look at any other relatively peer nation-state and compare performance top to bottom, per quality of life, education, heath & crime.

We basically suck.

You must be fun at parties.

You should look into the prison systems in France or Spain sometime.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky by the way was a classical Russian writer who also wrote "Crime and Punishment" and that line was referenced in "Con Air" (1997) too, lol. :)