Yesterday at lunch my coworkers were discussing green cards and citizenship since one of them had recently gotten married (she is Irish). This then lead to a general discussion of differences in governing mentalities. One coworker who is from the Netherlands gave us an example of wonderfully forward thinking governing that you would never see here in the United States:
A number of years back in the Netherlands large cities were having issues with youth unrest. On major holidays late at night many youths were getting drunk and then getting violent. They would go out lighting cars on fire, breaking windows, etc. On any given major holiday they would do something like 10 million dollars worth of damage. The government looked at this trend and decided to do something about it.
The government knew who the major "hooligans" were and so before the holidays began sending them information about massive parties that were free to youths on the holidays. There would be music, free food, free drink, and free weed. The only caveat was that once they got to the party they would have to stay there until 3am. Many youths took them up on the offer. The parties were massive blowouts so were costly, somewhere in the neighborhood of 1-2 million dollars, but they had the effect that the government was hoping: the violence subsided extensively. (The part-goers were likely so wasted by 3am they just wanted to go home!) So instead of paying for 10 million dollars worth of damage, they paid for 2 million dollars worth of parties. The best part over the long term was that youths in later years never really saw the holiday hooliganism, so were never really drawn to perform it.
Now, in the United States, this would be seen as "rewarding bad behavior." People would rail against it. Even though it was financially better for everyone and lead to a decrease in youth violence it would never be allowed to happen here because it was "rewarding bad behavior."
From the small amount of research I have done, it appears as though we have about 2.3 million people locked up in this country, and we pay anywhere from $30k-$50k a year on average per inmate. This means we are spending about 69-115 billion dollars a year on incarceration. Why not instead find jobs for them (like the CCC) and pay them a living wage? It would be epically cheaper, likely improve people's lives, and reduce recidivism.
But, it couldn't happen here. This Puritan nation cares more about punishing bad behavior than it does about uplifting society as a whole.