That is true, CG. We know that the punishment triangle is "Swift, Certain, and Severe" and that the facet which matters most to offender is "Certain." Knowing that you will get caught later is more important than maybe getting caught right now. Severity is the least salient. The death penalty for cutpurses was the classic case.

I found "Sexual Victimization Reported By Adult Correctional Authorities, 2009–11" and "Survey Of Sexual Violence In Adult Correctional Facilities, 2009–11 - Statistical Tables" both on the Bureau of Justice Statistics website right now:
http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail...
and
http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail...

Replacing, to judge from Toyota's recent announcement, private business.

I agree. Also, for everyone's sake if someone is in prison and has a chance of being released before they're very old, we should treat them humanely and try to rehabilitate them-- not for humanitarian reasons but in the interests of people they're going to interact with on the outside.

In general, I think we should have increased policing and less prison. Criminals think more about the probability of getting caught rather than what will happen if they do get caught.

The conservatives need to hear this from other patriots. Republican politicians push to the right on "law and order" and "get tough on crime." Most of the people in prison are there for _non-violent_ and _victimless_ crimes (i.e., drugs, but other similar as well). Violent offenders, of course, are never "cured" or "rehabilitated" but only find prison to be a suitable environment for predators. Prisons as we know them were invented by Quakers in Pennsylvania in the 18th century. That was when they invented solitary confinement. (Not everything about their religion is goodness and light.) And prisons are expensive. For the cost of imprisonment, even a violent offender could be given competent psychological counseling to identify (if not cure) their real problem.

Objectively, granted that some offenders are unremediable, imprisonment as internal exile may be the only alternative to simply executing them. However, given that serial murderers are known to have abused animals when they were children, is _that_ the point (objectively) where the law comes down to prevent future harms to innocent people, i.e., executing children who are cruel?

Prison is the blank-out problem in the Objectivist theory of government. We agree that the government has police powers as a proper function. We seldom talk about the appropriate consequences of trial and conviction.