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I like Defunct's suggestion. Especialy the part about "Basically work towards building a system that provides no reasonable excuse for criminals not to succeed once they get out of prison."

However, that opens up an entirely different can of worms. A criminal's status as one automatically socially classifies him as unable to hold certain positions, and employers are much less likely to hire someone with a criminal record. How do we solve this? We can't very well keep criminal records private, as that is rather grossly unfair to the general populace. Employers have a right to know if the man they just hired to work the cash register has a history of petty theft. The solution I can think of off the top of my head would be to have a government funded compensation program for the hiring of past criminals, as well as a form of special insurance against damages perpetrated by the individual in question. However, that could prove to be just as money intensive as our curent system, and that amount of money would not be justified until after the system was already established and working.

Restoring people's faith in a system like that will take time however, and until then previous criminals will still be their in their own little social caste, with few employment options and the general mistrust of the public that such status currently carries. How do we carry the system over until such a time as we can assure people of its effectiveness and safety?

And, quite honestly, as much as I'd like the sysem to work, I'd be about as skeptical as the general populous until actual results were in. It's an expensive and risky system, that could just as easily not work as it could work.

My concern with that is the community that the criminal is put it to rehabilitate. He would be living and working with a bunch of criminals. I would think that this could have a very negative affect on any person living there, countering what the program was intending to do. Perhaps, if all of the people really wanted to rehabilitate to society and live a crime-free life, then the community might be somewhat beneficial in the same way AA meetings are. At any rate, the area would need to be closely observed and guarded in the case of violence or other occurrences that could be detrimental to their rehabilitation.

Perhaps those that don't want to leave, don't have to. With permission, they could pay their own fees and work like they could anywhere else. This would give all of the inhabitants a feel as if they were a part of society, even though it would be a controlled one. Eventually a city would become too full with permanent residents to function as the rehab town it was originally. In this case, a new center cold be set up to start the process over again.

...aside from torture being against the Geneva convention and all humanitarian principles and ethics...we shouldn't rule by fear. Making an example out of them will either cause the public to fear the government, or to rebel against it. When you're confronted with an image like that, all of your rights feel threatened, and you either fear or rebel.

By the way, as a personal stance, I always viewed life in prison to be akin to torture. The death penalty has some deep-rooted immoral constructs attached to it too, of course, but life in prison seemed worse than death to me.

Uber Moral Crimes (Severe punishment, Lifetime Jail, medical guinae pigs. Depends on the crime in question.

Minor crimes (Flogging, punishment and other things. Then re-habilitation attempts)

Go with Education and treatment. Punishment only angers people and makes them want to repeat their offence or do worse things. Education would bore them out of misbehaving. that's what I think from my personal experiences with children, and children are the most honest age group.