Correct. What I said does not address that point because you had not raised it and I was trying to address your point, not write a comprehensive thesis on restorative, reformative, and rehabilitative justice. Which most definitely has grappled *extensively* with the problems of unrepentant bad actors.
To *briefly* summarize however:
1) That kind of behavior accounts for a vanishingly small fraction of what's punished as crime.
2) Existing punitive justice systems already suck at handling it.
3) Particularly, most prison based "solutions" to violent crime do absolutely nothing to prevent violent crime, in fact they increase it. They just localize it to within prisons, on supposedly "deserving targets".
4) Existing punitive prison systems often *increase* recidivism rates for harm done to others after leaving prison. Especially for violent crime and theft.
5) An alternative justice system doesn't need to be perfect, only better than what currently exists. Failure modes are *okay* so long as it can do better than the existing system.
6) No one ever said these justice systems related to prison abolition couldn't have coercive elements or escalate when necessary to prevent harm. The point is removing imprisonment (and other "bad people have bad things done to them" mechanisms) as a *punishment*.
To use the classic extreme example, I don't think anyone thinks one should simply let a confirmed serial killer roam free. But the point is that confinement would exist *only as an individualized solution* to such unrepentant bad behavior, for which there's no alternative, not as a punishment for it. And by removing prisons, we make it so that every single case in which somebody needs to be confined requires a level of individualized effort that's costly and complicated, removing imprisonment as an easy way to dump problems in a hole and forget about them - as opposed to actually trying to resolve them.
So, ultimately? I think this is just not the big deal you're making it out to be. There are simply so few crimes which:
1) Are actually stopped by existing punitive prison systems.
2) Cannot be resolved by any means other than incarceration.
3) Need dedicated holding facilities.
And it's fine if not all bad behavior is stopped. Really. Most bad behavior is not serial murder and rape. It's actually okay if a society doesn't have a solution to a particular bad behavior. Or if fixing the problem means the people around them do something to prevent harm while the bad behavior goes unchanged, and they just take the reputational hit over that. In fact it's very important that we accept that as an option! Because if we don't, then we end up automatically hurting people for the sake of hurting them when we don't actually have a solution to the problem.
Which is really the crux of the issue about prison abolition. Prison and other punitive justice mechanisms are often an answer to the question, "Well what *else* are we going to do to stop people if they won't behave?", rather than the question, "Do we have a response to this bad behavior that's better than doing nothing?"
Because that's the thing to remember. Prison and associated punitive justice systems are often much worse than doing nothing. We aren't starting from a society which has solved crime and evaluating the merits of choosing a gentler system based on whether or not it might permit people to behave worse. We are starting from a system which actively makes more crime for almost all of the issues it claims to address, which is brutally horrific to its targets, and which gives governments massive power to exert authoritarian control.
Alternative justice systems don't even have to be good. They just have to suck less. And that's a low bar.
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