Proponents of reducing the prison population because of excessive cost and over-crowding  --  that is, those who have been upbraiding the United States about being "incarceration nation"  --  inevitably make it a point to to reassure us that using "less structured" and more "rehabilitation-friendly" alternatives like halfway houses will save tax dollars and do just fine protecting public safety.

OK, that was then.

Today's Washington Post editorial is a tip-off that they've been pulling our leg all along.
Seems like halfway houses are also too expensive (isn't everything), harsh and ineffective, not to mention inconvenient to your local felon. 

As I suspected, the real agenda turns out to be, not the curtailment of prison as punishment, but the curtailment of punishment at all.

And why not? If, as we are so often lectured by the Left, the criminal is the victim (of poor schooling, bad parents, brain lesions, twinkies, et al.) why should he be punished? It wasn't his fault; it was our fault.

So we're the ones who should be punished.

As more and more of these characters are quietly put back on the street, as the Post all but explicitly suggests, we will be.