When a country is going broke and demonizing a huge segment of it's people with its current program
These are not necessarily tied together. A country going broke that spends money on EVERYTHING, including wars, banker bailouts, bridges to nowhere, congressional pork projects, new cars for clunkers and even a clunker program for appliances, does not mean that it has too many prisons. We could as easily argue that we have too many headstart programs or libraries. Going broke just means we're spending too much money. Maybe we should prioritize and spend MORE on criminal justice, including prisons.
As for the demonizing, maybe you can make an argument that some drug possession crimes should be decriminalized - which would save needing to prosecute and incarcerate folks who break those laws. Perhaps you want to make an argument for specific other laws you would like changed. But I think we actually have the opposite problem. I suggest we do not catch enough criminals or hold them for long enough. There are criminals free with dozens of previous convictions, who live a lifestyle of crime and will inevitably commit more crimes. There are many of examples of criminals who commit horrible violent crimes, who have been released from prison and go free to commit horrible violent crimes against some new innocent victims. I wish we could lock them up so they no longer victimize society.
As it stands, we have lots of human interaction in the criminal justice system, through many of those people have too much to do and too little time for each case. While each case gets human discretion and judgement from prosecutors, lawyers and judges, the system doesn't always produce the result you personally might like. It's as good as we're able to do so far, but laws like "three strikes" were enacted to help guide the system to results more in line with what was popularly wanted. Providing some guidance such as career criminals should be segregated from society, permanently if possible, seems like a reasonable instruction. Three strikes laws are one attempt to do that. Repealing "three strikes" and letting everyone with three or more felonies free, runs directly counter to all the above, as well as voter and legislative intent.
Sorry it upsets you to know some people with three or more convictions for crimes you personally don't think are "bad enough" are locked up for life. The alternative which is to allow more criminals more opportunities to commit more crimes is not acceptable. If we need more prisons to keep these people away from society, then so be it. Let's build what we need and tax accordingly.
