Baron Max said:
The role of prisons is NOT to be surrogate mothers to criminals, but to PUNISH them for disobeying the law. If you want to mother the criminals, please do so at your own damned expense ....NOT mine!
It's not about being surrogate mother.
It also
shouldn't be about punishment.
The point should be to make society safer.
Punishment is not a very effective deterrent at all.
You said yourself, statistics show that people who are locked up generally end up returning to prison.
Also, as statistics show, offering proper education, stress management classes and money handling classes helps to keep people from returning to prison by helping to offer "criminals" an alternative to the lifestyle they previously had.
You basically have two choices:
1.) Kill, or otherwise dispose of all criminals, regardless of the severity of their crime, to be "rid" of the criminal element (which actually would just result in getting rid of the poor criminals more than anything else).
2.) Help the criminals leave their life of crime behind by offering them other opportunitits, while they pay their debt to society in prison.
As you said, imprisonment does not end criminal behavior, however, education DOES seem to help.
So, if you want safer streets, educate people to get them OFF the streets.
Or we can continue doing what we are doing, and continue to blame the criminals, and get absolutely nowhere.
Any member of a society is a product of that society.
Just as bad kids should (most often) be blamed on bad parenting, bad citizens should (most often) be blamed on bad domestic policy.
By locking criminals away and forgetting about them we are simply sweeping our own failures under the rug rather than owning up to the responsibility.