Take the next step and hire on as a prison guard. Your opinion won't change much but you'll get a feeling for "why things are the way they are" and a substantial part of it can be attributed to outside (well-intentioned) meddling.

My friend was a guard at a maximum facility and he said the best prisoners were the lifers; they had nothing to prove and were in it for the long haul; the worst were the ones doing a short sentence or had been transferred from lesser-security prisons.

Part of the problem is we have prison stratification - instead of each suburb or neighborhood having a jail for the appropriate inmates from the area, we ship them all to massive processing facilities for "efficiency" which has all sorts of side-effects.

It's entirely possible to have empathy for prisoners without desiring them to be released from prison.