Might've taken this in good faith had I not checked your comment history to see you insisting all drag queens are a danger to children, so let's just dress you down and block you real quick, mkay?

The point has been made in another reply to the initial comment that rehabilitation would still yield better results than incarceration for keeping the "people on the street" safe, as the only way incarceration is able to lower the number of "dangerous convicts" is by putting them in a cell for life. When rehabilitation is successful, the number of "dangerous criminals" can actually go down in a way that does not deprive those individuals from seeing trees for the rest of their lives.

Additionally, convicts absolutely can and do hurt people in prison, the people hurt just happen to be other convicts, not to mention the violence they often face from the people who run the place, who have a tendency to enter the field of incarceration with authoritarian personality types and the intent of mistreating or exploiting prisoners. All this disregarded, despite the fact that you acknowledge the possibility that some of those who end up in these facilities are innocents - the only category of person you are supposedly interested in protecting is not protected in these institutions as they currently exist.

There's much more I could say about prisons to make this point, but what I'm saying is that prisons do not provide a neutral experience, they are not just people sitting in empty rooms experiencing nothing - they are places that generally leave people more damaged than when they came in, and often inflict that damage for years, in some cases for something as victimless as a marijuana charge. Thus, while rehabilitation has the potential to concretely improve society and the lives of people (y'know, the thing convicts are), incarceration as it currently exists can only hurt people and send them back out into society worse off than they were before. The only argument for it is to insist it is justified for doing so, by inventing a dynamic where "they," strangers placed into prison, ALL present a danger to "us," the "people on the street," that they either cannot be fixed or we should not bother, and that whatever they get, they deserve. Maybe you can convince someone that's true for a convicted rapist, but I think you'd have a harder time when it comes to victims of addiction, poverty, and/or an imperfect justice system.