Fair points, if I were being more careful I'd probably phrase it in terms of "we should minimize incentives for regulatory capture that leads to mass incarceration." As I get older I'm increasingly less idealistic a lot more comfortable with the fact that the world is a generally irrational and unfair place, but this is a topic that still rather gets my goat.
I think ideals are important, they just also get us into trouble when we overapply them. We forget that they're ideals, and think of them as reality.
A capitalist or communist ideal(s), for example, can be good. People dealing with each other by beneficial mutual agreement. People cooperating out of social solidarity. Both exist (imperfectly) in the world.
The problems come when we overapply these ideas. Justifying abusive labour practices or banking excesses because Adam Smith's village baker parable must apply to all things always. Building whole worldviews from a core ideal, as if it were F=ma.
Modern prisons evolved entirely out of their ideals. Imprisonment wasn't a common punishment until modern times, and the early logic (eg bentham) was about rehabilitation. Lots of (retrospectively ugly) ideals about morality and character were at play. Lots of horrible things done in their name. The project essentially failed, and rehabilitation aspect of prison devolved into vestigial formalities.
I imagine the rehabilitation ideal seemed enlightened, relative to the punitive ideals of previous eras. The US' 18th century "cruel and unusual punishment" concept related, I imagine, to these new enlightenment era ideals. A few hundred years later, and we can't even imagine a society without prisons. We're not even quite sure what they're for. At least, we don't agree on what they're for.
