Honestly if society locked me in a cage for years and treated me as America treats its prisoners, and my work as a psychologist got me a front row seat, I would do everything I could to to work against said society when I got out. You can’t treat others as enemies and expect anything but the same in kind.

The Nordic model of you made a mistake, you need to be punished, but what can we do during that punishment to make sure you won’t need to resort to that again is the only rational and civilized path.

And the rational, barbaric, uncivilized path would be to just kill people if we refuse to make the effort to rehabilitate them.

We in the US choose option 3 because it’s profitable. Irrationally provide no rehabilitation, make them MORE bitter and antisocial by forcing them live in inhuman conditions and to work for free as slaves (a dollar or less an hour is effectively free), then release them and see them in a month for more slave labor.

At this point, I have to assume our insane recitivism rate is by design.