When you say things like this:
Thank you for explaining to me how I see the world. I always appreciate it when someone goes to that effort on my behalf, especially unasked.

it behooves you not to say things like this:
You seem to regard these people, more or less, as though they were ill, or perhaps mentally disabled; in other words, you consider them as bereft of either the necessary volition to behave other than in a criminal fashion, or of the necessary reason to differentiate behavior which accords with society's requirements from behavior which does not.

The modifying word 'seem' is merely a weasel word. Here what you are doing is telling me how I see the world, something that you will not accept about yourself, 'especially unasked'. Each of us has stated how the other person appears to see the world - you take exception to this being applied to yourself, though.

To rehabilitate someone is to restore him to an ability which he previously lacked

Much of your argument rests on this faulty definition. 'Habilitate' means 'to make fit or capable'. In a legal context, a person is a capable member of society until they perform an antisocial act, a criminal act. Re-habilitation means making that person a capable member of society again. Your definition doesn't even make internal sense, because you can't restore something that has not yet existed ('previously lacked').

Antisocial behaviour is also not limited to crimes. Someone can become an alcoholic, cutting off their loved ones, and undergo rehabilitation to restore them to their previous capacity. Hence why I formulate it as 'done a shitty thing' rather than focus simply on criminals.

I by default regard him as having made a choice to behave as he has, and, until he demonstrates otherwise, being just as fully equipped as anyone else to choose to behave otherwise.

This statement betrays your near-complete lack of understanding of human psychology, and also mental illness. One part of rehabilitative work is to help the person understand how they're making patterns of bad decisions without realising it, in an unconscious way. The idea that everything we do is a conscious, premeditated choice is pure pablum. Simple evidence that people have trouble choosing to behave a certain way by simple fiat lies in the low success rate of diets.

It's really quite a bizarre point for anyone familiar with the topic (myself formally trained, also worked in neurology) to see put forward. People are not capable of making decisions to the same degree, for a host of reasons, even simple education. People often don't see the harmful patterns in their lives because sometimes they're simply unaware of the existence of such a thing. One example might be yellow journalism - it's harder to fall prey to it once you've been educated in statistics, journalism, or one of a few similar fields. But if you don't know the tricks they use, you can't really counter them since you're not aware of them.

Do you ask that I not merely vow allegiance to your principles, but value those principles more highly than I value my own life and unpunctured carcass?

Criminology is actually pretty clear on the point. If you rehabilitate people rather than ostracise them, there are fewer punctured carcasses overall. The problem with your argument style is that it's similar to the pro-gun lobby: it focuses solely on the individual situation. "If X happened, I'd want a gun!". The thing is, with a better, more inclusive society, "X" happens far less frequently.

By making histrionic personal appeals as the pro-gun lobby does, you distort decision-making. It's an open secret that prisons in the US take minor offenders and make major offenders out of them; making decent jobs harder to get, exposing them long-term to harder criminal contacts, and reinforcing the social divide between your 'honest citizens' and 'criminals'. Sure, if someone came at me with a knife, I'd like a gun. But I'd rather them not come at me with a knife in the first place. Stop crime at the source, the motive, rather than at the last step before it actually happens. An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure.

Perhaps you believe it is possible to empanel a sufficiency of police officers to ensure that such men are unable to pursue their fell trade. This has been tried. It has never worked.

When, in the US? "Never worked" suggests multiple attempts. It's certainly worked outside the US, in Australia.

And even if it were possible so to multiply their ranks, it is inherently enfeebling of self-respect and self-determination to be dependent, for such a basic need as the integrity of one's own corpus, on another human being -- the condition of a child, not that of an adult.

This is patent nonsense. We are a society, and we are all in this together. The only way I would accept this comment from you is if you were a fully self-sufficient recluse living in the woods somewhere. Do you live only on food you grew yourself? Drink only water you collect yourself? Clothe yourself only in self-made clothes? Use only your self-made fuel for heating, should the climate require? Self-treat all medical issues, from headaches to broken bones? Transport yourself using only your feet or self-made items? If not, then by your own definition, you dependent on another human being for a basic need and are therefore a child, with thoroughly enfeebled self-respect and self-determination. And even if you are such a self-sufficient person, pretty much everyone else in the developed world is not, along with pretty much everyone who isn't a subsistence farmer/fisher in the developing world.

The short form of the argument is that the US currently does exactly what you're claiming is the right way: fuck the criminals and arm the populace. It doesn't work. 1% of US adults are in prison. The US has an incarceration rate of 750/100k - all other Western democracies are between 70 and 150, except for New Zealand at 200. The US is a clear outlier. It still has a higher violent crime rate. Its murder rate is four times that of its contemporaries. It's creating a hardened underclass that doesn't have access to the self-respect and particularly not the self-determination you so value. The extreme demand on the public purse for prisons stops beneficial infrastructure projects from being developed. You try to make me sounds Soviet in my outlook, hoping that the reflected anti-glory taints what I say, whereas I am more "other western democracies" in my outlook.

You have excellent rhetoric, but the underpinning arguments are faulty to their core. I would also encourage you though to drop the every-example-person-is-a-man thing, particularly when you're making the argument that everyone should be master of their own destiny.

Edit: cut out a few quote/response stanzas to shorten things