Clearly not, but if you've already made it through prison once then you've already figured out how to survive inside. I'm not saying it's fun and nice and care

Clearly not, but if you've already made it through prison once then you've already figured out how to survive inside. I'm not saying it's fun and nice and carefree, but seemingly for plenty of people it's doable. The point I was trying to make is that to the normal person who has a clean record and isn't barred from any jobs, can own guns, etc etc keeping their record clean is actually very, very valuable. It's much, much harder to make $100k a year and generally participate in society with a felony record than without. So if you take $60k a year loss in earning potential times the rest of your life you're talking about maybe $1mm or $2mm a year that you'll probably lose if you commit a crime and get convicted. That's a pretty big deal. But if you've already got a record that ship has sailed and your earning potential is already much much lower. The spectre of losing the possibility of that life is gone and so there's much less incentive not to commit more crimes. You say that the reputational loss is a lesser reason to avoid prison but I suspect that most people would argue that a couple million dollars is actually a pretty big deal.