You're welcome, for the record there are 4 studies there one linked on each word that is a link. :P
It's effective societal messaging in general, unfortunately. We'd rather treat people as "monsters" and "beasts" that are beyond fixing and lock them up out of sight and out of mind (until they get out and do something bad again and go away again) than treat them as, well, people. See also: a majority of this thread.
It doesn't help that most of this forum was born after these policies were in place and it's all they've probably heard or known their entire life.
But it's simply Republican pushed ignorance, to help enrich prison related corporations that actively lobby for the current systems in place (including the corporations that actually own prisons for profit).
Anyone who is a Democrat or left leaning in general and truly cares about science, statistics, facts, reality needs to do research on the subject and come away as you did.
Unfortunately, that's really hard. There are many in this thread that will not read those studies, or worse they will read them and ignore them because they care about their personal feelings than what science says. They'd rather see a victim's family receive some weird form of "justice" via punishment for the aggressor, even if said punishment will statistically likely lead to MORE people getting hurt, rather than minimizing future pain for humanity in general.
Because at the end of the day the left leaning population of the country is just as susceptible to ignoring reality and will fall into similar trappings as the people that refuse vaccinations, or hate abortion, or hate gun control, or hate free health care, or...you get the idea. It's very hard to get people to change once they're stuck on a particular idea as being the right one even if it flies in the face of all evidence to the contrary.
e: And thank you for taking the time to check it out and learn, we need more people to do that and I appreciate it a lot.