

You’re the opposition party
That’s the problem. They’re not, and they don’t want to be. The Democratic Party leadership runs it as the alternative party to the Republican Party and nothing more. There were plenty of opportunities to platform and support actual progressive candidates, but they instead choose to run the same old kind of moderate “don’t rock the boat”-type candidates and court conservative voters in the hopes of leeching votes away from Republicans.
This is the main problem when it comes to politicians not caring that incarceration costs more than helping people.
An entire industry is built on profiting from legally-permissible slavery, and the only way to achieve growth is to either extract more value from the prisoners or the number of prisoners. The former isn’t an option since prison work isn’t mandatory, so that means growth is only achievable by imprisoning more people.
To make that happen, the prison-industrial complex uses lobbyists to encourage more “tough on crime” laws and harsher sentencing.
It really isn’t a surprise that the whole idea of rehabilitation scares the politicians getting kickbacks from a private prison industry that thrives on recividivism and driving people to do things that get themselves incarcerated. They don’t give a rat’s ass that it costs the taxpayer more money when the alternative means that their own livelihood will be negatively affected.
And that’s precisely why we need more elected progressive politicians. The career politicians we have right now don’t care about their constituents, they only care about themselves and by extension their corporate masters.