To kill or imprison someone who had no choice about their actions would be unjust. To simplify things, assume a serial killer that would kill again, or a thief

To kill or imprison someone who had no choice about their actions would be unjust. To simplify things, assume a serial killer that would kill again, or a thief that would continue stealing. Why is imprisoning this person worse than more people falling victim to this person. And I really want to keep the focus on someone repeatedly breaking the law, one off crimes are probably much more tricky to deal with. The choice here is not between imprisoning and not imprisoning a person for doing something they could not avoid, in case of not imprisoning that person you have to take into account future harm. Same here, who knows what people will do in the future, even in a deterministic universe, but let us pretend we know, we can make things more complicated with probabilities and whatnot later.