I'm okay with violent felons owning guns after they serve their sentence...

[EdwardBernays]

3. Well

For a variety of reasons:

- The criminal justice system is classiest and racist. It will NEVER put rich white people in jail forever. Its delusional to think otherwise. So.. What you're really suggesting is looking up minorities and the poor forever.
- We can't afford to lock up that many people for life.
- As a rule criminal justice has always had a reform aspect; ditching that for whatever reasons you have won't happen.

So we can't and won't and even if we tried it wouldn't be fairly applied.

If you'd like to see a system that works check out Scandinavia - which has the lowest recidivism rates in the world. Also check out places with lower crime rates and see how they accomplish that; it's not through threats of harsher punishment. In fact the US has some of the most harsh punishment of any 1st world country and some of the worst crime rates. Make the obvious connection: tough punishments don't prevent crime. And endless jail terms don't prevent repeat offenders. And making the US prison population even larger (it's already the world's largest - and that includes China) won't stop violent crime.