I feel like the prison system is the victim of perverse incentives.

The goal given to them is "house this person securely for a specific length of time at the lowest cost possible". They are rewarded for cutting costs.

But the total cost we pay is the cost to imprison this person the second and third time when they re-offend. It's the policing costs when they're homeless because they can't find housing or get a job. It's the health care costs they can never pay for when all of the above inevitably leads to further problems.

To reduce the lifetime cost of this person on society (financially and otherwise) we should be incentivising prisons to actually rehabilitate.

But we won't, because our society is largely based on Calvinist nonsense that says there are "bad people" and we should celebrate those people having bad things happen to them.