The psychopath question is a valid one, and I think it is unfair to dismiss it entirely, so let me address it. There are some people who are born without empat

The psychopath question is a valid one, and I think it is unfair to dismiss it entirely, so let me address it. There are some people who are born without empathy or morals, and they will do cruel and evil things just for kicks. I do think that prisons will exist in some capacity basically forever, but I would apply my philosophy as a software engineer to this problem as well: - Look at other places that have a successful implementation, study how they do it. - Copy it and adapt it to my use case. There are prison systems that are more cruel, but there are also prison systems that are LESS cruel and get better results. Either way, we have some holes we need to plug in our own system which seems to be optimized to make the right people money while being as cruel as possible. However, most prisoners are not psychopaths and our money would be better spent setting up programs to help people escape poverty and have a decent quality of life to make criminal behavior less attractive. A lot of criminal activity emerges as a by-product of poverty. Illegal drugs and all of the crime that goes along with that [0] would be remediated if people were not so desperate to escape poverty. Additionally crimes associated with vagrancy [1] would be remediated. 0: ( Such as territory conflicts leading to violence, selling the illegal drugs on the street, etc. ) 1: ( bike theft, sleeping in illegal places, trespassing, drug possession )