Locking someone away imposes suffering, but it asks nothing of them that reaches the person they hurt. Real accountability means facing the harm, owning it, and repairing it, and few things help a victim heal more than that. Prison offers no path to it.
Most cases end in private plea deals with the victim nowhere in the room, and many people who cause harm are never arrested. Victims mostly want safety, accountability and fairness. The system is not even aiming at those things, so it cannot deliver them, and healing only becomes possible once success is measured by what survivors need.
The injury and the fear do not go away just because the person who caused them is behind bars. Victims rarely heal quickly after a prison sentence, if they heal at all. Many are left without closure, carrying unresolved trauma.
Almost no one first meets violence by committing it. Most were exposed to it before they ever caused it, and shame, isolation and exposure to violence are what drive it. Prison deepens exactly these conditions, so it breeds more violence instead of less, while each act of violence remains a choice the person made.
If prison made people safe, the country that imprisons more people than any other would be the safest in history, and it is not. Reforms that touch only nonviolent crimes leave most prisoners untouched. Reliance on prison rests on a story about monstrous others, so ending it means taking on violence directly.