>>518692388 (OP)
The issue with prison reform is that it is very hard to quantify the value of perceived justice.
It is easy to say that prisons focused on rehabilitation as the primary objective produce less reoffenders. All the data is there for you to examine and draw a conclusion that you can then put into a report or a university paper.
But how do you quantify the impact it has on families when the person that killed their loved one is living in relative comfort and recieving hundrends of thousands of dollars worth of psychological care aimed to build them up as a person? You can't quantify that. You can't put a number on it and so all the academics just ignore it. University fields have become so specalised, and it is not within the scope of the fields that study these issues to examine moral of philosophical issues that can't be quanitfied with data.
And the issue of perceived justice goes beyond just the families of victims. It has an impact on society at large. And not just as a disincentive for crime, which it may or may not even work as, but in the morale, sense of pride and sense of community that a society has. It is almost impossible to quantify the sense of disenfranchisement and disillusion that a justice system that does not adequately punish criminals creates, and even if you were to take a survey or something to get some kind of data on this, it is impossible to quantify what impact this sense of disillusion has on society.
That is why the cottage industry of prison reform is so heavily skewed towards rehabilitation. It is why political systems where the academic class hold more influence pursue prison reform much more so than nations with more populist political systems.
I don't take anyone that pushes prison reform seriously because inevitably their thinking is narrow and confined only to what can be measured and presented in a peer reviewed 'scientific' paper.