>Sending this guy to prison for 25 years is a waste for everyone involved.
Agreed. 10 years is pretty much a life sentence already; who is the same person that they were a decade ago? Sentences beyond 10 years are not instructive but punitive and sadistic: if you're putting people in cages for that long then justice would be better served to banish. International waters? Make an interior Australia on federal lands over a few States: walled off with full security entry/exit points?
Not only is taking so many years equivalent to partial death, without the normalcies prison strips from its victims (yes America's prisoners are victims like the Brit's victims of hang-em for everything were still victims) it effectively kills off the family lines of these people because only a few states have conjugal visits. Most prisoners in the US are in enforced inceldom. If you argue crime is genetic and it's a good thing they are prevented from reproducing, then you just contravened civils rights arguments against that.
As bad as the American ones are, Japan treats you worse. I got to hear my internet friend and troll JS on voice chat after Japan let him out of jail, what he said completely disabused me of any interest in visiting that place. It's soft torture not by exposure to appaling conditions (US), but by excruciating and consistent techniques of 'light' torture employed, such as only being able to sit/kneal and lay in two positions almost every bit of all 24-hour periods and being unable to communicate with anybody. It is a mental solitary confinement, and if I witnessed some parent treat even an "unruly child" the way the Japanese system treats those in their custody, I would see pink mist/red cave and be sent off to prison for a long time myself.
Zimbardo's prison experiment decades ago should have indicated to us that we are experiencing dozens of holocaust-tier human rights crises (sans the mass deaths) every year these things continue to operate in current form.
If you can't treat them as human in prison (partial autonomy, dignity), then you are saying they are criminally insane. If they are insane, they need to be in an assylum and not a dungeon (assylums had {and may still have [idk]} their own serious issues too). Prison should never be punitive, that is partially killing someone to punish them. Deterrence Theory is century old bunk we tell ourselves so we don't feel bad for Uncle Ned possibly being equivalent to a camp guard in a massive human rights quagmire made trying to address a millennia-old problem.
Wow, this turned into a rant! Time to smack submit, push the hemorrhoid back up, flush, and be done! :^)