When one of these losers is being chased on the highway by a couple of police cars, and with a police helicopter overhead, you wonder why he doesn't just stop and give it up before his crazy driving kills himself or someone else. But you also have to wonder what his parents were doing while he was growing up that they couldn't raise him to become a rational adult. A majority of the men in prison came from fatherless families. In some cosmic sense, it may not be entirely their fault that they took the wrong road. But that doesn't change the fact that it was the wrong road -- or make it any less dangerous to turn them loose.
No doubt such concerns are behind efforts to "rehabilitate" prisoners or substitute "crime prevention" programs instead of incarceration. But magic words do not create magic realities. Innocent people have been killed by "rehabilitated" criminals who had been set free. And "prevention" programs do not prevent anything other than putting dangerous people behind bars. The pretense of having solutions can be more dangerous than the problem. Yet there are whole armies of professionals and semi-professionals -- shrinks and social workers, for example -- whose jobs depend on pretending that they have answers, even when no one has answers. And the temptation is great for judges and politicians to pretend to be solving a problem by turning over delinquents or criminals to such people, as a way to "do something" -- or to look like they are doing something.
In terms of broader social policy, we need to make a sharp distinction between saying that some people are victims of a tragic fate and saying that they are victims of discrimination by employers, bias in the courts or the sins of other individuals they encounter. Scapegoating other people is not likely to help -- and it can distract attention from the real problems, which are too serious to misdiagnose.