Personally, I believe there should be a major bias in public service for criminals
It should be highly incentivised to train towards public service applicable jobs, and they should be offered any positions that can be filled, or recommend as replacements
A government that actively chooses the most unfortunate cases of society to be the exemplary figures in society would probably curbstomp a lot of social issues, as much as one can, and it is an untapped resource
If you actively gave them a very wholesome, but not particularly fancy diet, and mandatorily worked on health and education, as part of the sentence, then tehre is absolutely no excuse when they get out
If you are guaranteed to get a degree / trade, and likely a job offer, yk
Even something as simple as how centrelink used to work when it was nationalised, where you could apply for jobs that will take prisoners specifically
A lot of things going wrong is in the privitisation of prisons, as well as the specifics of what we intern, and the quality of the programs
If every prisoner came out understanding physical health and wellbeing, as well as mental health and wellbeing, due to mandatory kinesthetic-psychological courses and such, and a degree, a second offense would be grounds for life, even on smaller cases, and it would very quickly tell you who truly can be a participant in society, and who cannot
Most government spending is also comically bloviated, you can compare to any historical spending and costs for anything, and the current glut of modern economics is entirely a new pheomena, and the spending is very easy to tell is mismanaged
You can calculate the military spending for example, give them massively better wages than they currently have, off of very generous estimates of hardware and so on, including contract prices, and you will quickly discover there is a huge amount that does not add up
This applies to health spending and such too, modern governments have a bunch of circumstances that incentivise as well as allow for extremely reckless and inefficient spending
Deficit spending, monetary theory, service economy, all the effects of a great many things have resulted in an absolute nightmare logistically