Re: Guilty as charged
People in prison do not commit crimes against the general public.
Because no "crime lords" ever continued to operate their empires from behind bars.
The main problem of using imprisonment as the go-to recourse for offenders is that, even for violent crimes, sentences tend to be in the single-digit number of years, and people get released again.
If you imprison people as punishment, with no aim of rehabilitation, they often come out of prison and go straight back to committing crime. Typically, they make new criminal contacts whilst "inside", what with being locked up 24h a day with others who have committed crimes.
Criminology is a wide-ranging and complex subject. typically, the aim is to reduce the harm on society that crime poses, and the "lock 'em away" attitude has been shown, time and again, to be counter-productive to this goal. I won't profess to be an expert on the subject by any means, but your statement is both simplistic, and demonstrably wrong.
Unfortunately, it is the same simplistic attitude that is frequently taken by right-wing politicians, who tend to be led by "common sense" rhetoric, and the need to be seen to be "tough on crime", rather than being led by evidence. I'd dearly love to see some proper evidence-led policy in this area, but take one look at the folk we have in charge, and weep.