Maybe the old ideas of publicly chopping off a hand for theft were the best. One way or another it will prevent car theft. Even if simply by making it hard to drive a stolen car away hands-free.
It seems to me that, at least when talking about crimes that harm others, criminality isn’t curable; the kind of person who cause others harm isn’t just going to stop because someone told them “no” or gave some kind of punishment.
That's not how any of this works. Criminals generally have poor executive function but plenty of non criminals also do as well. The strongest predictors are situational, and we do everything we can to ensure they can't escape those situations by branding them for life with a criminal record and providing little to no opportunity for improvement.
I’d argue that once those situational factors have created a criminal, it’s an irreversible process — you have someone who has been irrevocably transformed into a problem.
To reduce crime those situational factors need to be fixed before the criminal is created.
