Personally, I think the problem is that both parties have something positive about their approach to crime but neither approach will work for everyone.
The Republican approach of "getting tough" is necessary for some criminals. It's a fact that some people have just become so bad by genetics or by damage from their upbringing or whatever that they aren't reformable. They need to be in jail and away from everyone else.
The Democratic "rehabilitation" approach will work for some criminals. Certainly not all, and probably not even a majority. Among repeat offenders, very few. But dollar for dollar, it's much, much cheaper. If you successfully rehabilitate someone, that means they turn into a productive citizen - making money for the country instead of sucking away 50k a year or whatever the cost to jail them is.
The problem is that if you only apply one of the approaches, you're setting up a bad system. Jailing all the repeat offenders is wasteful because some could be reformed. Trying to reform everyone is wasteful because some can't - and it's also dangerous if you just let people out of jail by mistake when they haven't really changed. We need to figure out a balance between the two sides if we really want to get the best results.
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