@LukeAlmighty it's a tough question. Prison has benefits but it has a lot of negatives too. It's a preferable system to execution or heavy fines. Community service should be enough for people committing petty crimes. If I had to change prison, perhaps make sentences shorter but make it a much more shitty place to be. Hearing from my friends who have worked at prisons, the inmates are treated super well. So well that my roommate actually couldn't stand it. He just felt like a babysitter. Then of course it's not like the violent criminals actually change in prison, they just join gangs on the inside.

It depends on the crime what punishment should be and I think we need a pretty good amount of reform there. Parole, mandatory therapy, and things like rehab/halfway homes should be utilized more often for things like illicit drugs and crimes related to mental illness. Petty crimes should be punished with community service. Theft should entail community service as well as either returning the items or paying for them if they cannot be returned. Some things like smoking weed should just be decriminalized entirely.

For violent crime and other serious crimes, prison should be used in addition to the above. But prison should be treated a bit more like a school, having a full day of "classes" with your block for different things and meals scheduled at times different from other blocks. I think it's important to keep the prison blocks as separate as possible to prevent larger gangs from forming and such. Maybe even decrease the size of the blocks to only a couple hundred inmates or so.