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> rehabbing a group of friends doesn't seem to work

And if it were gangsters, it seems like it would have the opposite effect. Three square meals a day and some downtime to plan your next misdeed. And heck, the same goes for activists actually. So there would have to be no personal contact. Not that the US prison system is in any way about rehab.

> If it's a safe place to keep bad people, you're not keeping them there ... This is a sum of the parts less than the whole situation

Well presumably only other bad people sign up to help out bad people, and the idea would be that only with enough support, the sum of the parts would indeed be reduced. Trying to gauge my own utility function, it feels that sentences from between 3 months to 2 years would have corresponding increasing harshness on life-as-I-know-it. Under and it's a vacation, over and my present existence is basically completely gone. Of course those with a different uh, world view, would have a wildly different utility function.

OTOH this is clearly not a DIY avenue, and if that political will were actually available, instead of further codifying the prison industry why not just actually fix the damned legal system instead - vague laws, prosecutorial overreach, understandable due process, right to representation, broken sentencing, etc.



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