> You argument is that humans cannot make choices, we are rag dolls tossed around by fate (or whichever system you feel like attacking).

We can with a high degree of confidence say that a focus on rehabilitation, training, and safer prison environments reduces future crime rates, the same way that we can say that putting air bags in cars reduces automobile deaths. You can take from that what you will about free will, but there just is an obvious relationship here, I don't think anyone can dispute that.

I don't think I'm attacking the concept of free will if I say that adding guard rails on a twisty road will reduce automobile deaths. I don't think I'm attacking the concept of free will if I say that areas with high job opportunities and housing rates tend to have less crime, and that investing in public infrastructure can lower crime rates. Similarly, I don't think I'm attacking the concept of free will if I say that prisoners being able to get a job after they leave prison is heavily correlated with recidivism rates.

> Criminals are human beings and you don't have a right to mold them according to your whims

Okay sure, but giving prisoners access to educational and recreational materials and programs isn't "molding them" against their will. They want this stuff too.

It's not for a prisoner's benefit that jails are charging money to make phone calls to their family -- that's not a policy that's born out of our commitment to avoid changing their minds against their will. We're not talking about "reeducating" people, we're looking at very obvious statistical data that says people who don't spend their entire prison sentence wasting their minds, who have training to get a job after they leave prison, who aren't regularly placed into dangerous situations that reinforce fight/flight responses while they're in prison, are less likely to hurt other people.

And you can look at that and say that it's distasteful, or that they don't deserve a job, or that you don't like the idea that environment and resources have an obvious statistical effect on crime rates; but if you do, then I think that you should also have to grapple with telling ordinary people who have committed no crimes that you're deliberately putting prisoners into situations where the math says that those prisoners are more likely to commit future crimes.

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To add onto this, we already do have policies in prisons that are designed to mold prisoner minds, many of them really problematic -- we knock off jail time for prisoners that take on dangerous jobs (often for little to no pay), and the excuse we use is that it's good for them. We've put prisoners into extremely dangerous situations fighting wildfires in California even though many of those prisoners on release are not eligible to be firefighters because of their felony records. Less on the problematic side, we also regularly commute drug sentences if prisoners will enter rehab programs and do community service, a judicial policy that pretty much everyone thinks is a good idea.

So it's not like I'm proposing some kind of dangerous unprecedented idea here, we are already more than happy to talk about rehabilitation as an excuse for policy when it suits us. I'm not proposing a brand new unheard-of idea, I'm just arguing that giving access to books, educational materials, and entertainment will also very clearly make society safer -- and that whether or not you think it's anyone's responsibility to keep prisoners from re-offending, it is still kind of messed up to tell ordinary citizens, "we're going to have policies that make you less safe because we're worried somebody somewhere isn't suffering enough." As a citizen, even isolated from my beliefs about how justice actually works and how it's different from punishment, I still think it's pretty understandable and pretty logical to be upset about that.