I bet if the catch and release criminals were sent to live in the gated communities and high security condo buildings, the judges would be less inclined to let people out to reoffend.
I don't think that the US lacks harsh punishment at all - compared to peer countries, prison conditions are terrible, the incarcerated population is massive, etc.
What I do agree with is that enforcement feels ineffective. Every time a criminal commits an offence, they are spinning a roulette wheel and hoping it doesn't land on "go to prison". Making sentences longer and conditions worse doesn't change the odds that a particular criminal will end up punished, it just means the downside is worse (and increases prison populations). Even when a criminal is caught, they're often bailed and able to abscond. The question should be how to increase the effectiveness of enforcement whilst preserving rights and protections against wrongful punishment.
The other side of the equation is looking at the carrot, not just the stick. If life sucks and people turn to criminality because they feel like they don't live in a society that gives a damn, you have to improve society so people have something to live for.
I think a lot of this weirdly needs to be "vibes based policy" as it were. People need to believe that justice will be done in order to feel secure, and to feel that if they were to commit a crime that they wouldn't get away with it. Objective reality doesn't control behaviour, peoples' beliefs do.
Additionally, what you're proposing is incredibly optimistic from the perspective of how much economic utility prisoners actually have.
The median state's average cost of housing a prisoner is about $65,000 a year, with wealthy coastal states like CA, WA, NYC costing over $100,000 per prisoner per year. [1]
It's a sad economic reality, but many of the people in these prisons aren't even economically capable of producing output that has a market value even meeting the costs it takes it house them, let alone exceeding it, with the exceptions being largely concentrated in the minimum security prisons where white collar criminals and executives are housed (think Martin Shkreli, Bernie Madoff, etc), though you obviously can't ask people like that to perform the same kind of economically productive work that enticed them to get themselves sent to prison in the first place, if that were even possible (would you invest any of your money in a hedge fund that had a CEO working from prison for fraud?).
[1] https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-do-states-spend-on-pr...
Gosh, it's almost like the state is spending tax money to help its citizens! The horror!
I mean can you give any non-absurd answer how you think this works? Someone knocks over a liquor store with a box cutter: is there some magic number of years in prison that they can be released where they won't reoffend?
Every piece of evidence I've seen indicates that the opposite happens: people in prison are traumatized further exacerbating mental illness, connected with other criminals, and then released with a criminal record that makes it even harder for them to obtain legal employment, making crime even more attractive. This effect is generational: children separated from their parents by prison time are more likely to end up in prison themselves. Your "solution" doesn't solve crime, it causes crime.
Not only does your "solution" not work, it's ethically repulsive. The vast majority of crimes are crimes of desperation, and you are so self-absorbed that you're only concerned with solving your own problem--crime--and totally unconcerned with the suffering which causes people to commit crime in the first place. Your only solution is to cause even more suffering by locking people up and throwing away the key.
The causes of crime are economic, and crime will continue until that problem is addressed. It's not hard to see that if you have any care at all for your fellow humans.