Ever wonder why habitual pedophile sex offenders aren't locked up for life, but are encouraged to "rejoin the community"? Another was just arrested here, again, for this time running into a yard and grabbing little kids to fondle them.
Ever wonder why chain gangs went away? A great deterrent, and a great way to get the most unpleasant road work done?
Ever wonder why hardcore violent crime prisoners get things like weight benches, so they can be even more dangerous when they come out?
ACLU.
Okay, and there are some things that come with this: Due to the ACLU, the government has to prove more and do more to keep you in prison....so it's not as easy to throw people in jail, and the evidentiary rules and standards of proof are not as lax. You got that along with the ACLU arguing that prisoners should not be kept in Turkish-style dungeons.
FYI-chain gangs went away because they were in fact slave labor. Whenever someone needed labor on the cheap, the local force would routinely round up every black person in sight for violating the various vagrancy laws, and then they'd have a new slave force...just like the good old days.
That's why chain gangs were done in, not because we like to be nice to prisoners.
And you can thank groups like the ACLU for doing away with that form of 20th century slavery. Which is exactly what it was, along with the "vagrancy" laws that effectively criminalized being socially unwanted and/or the wrong color.