Prisons do not exist to address interpersonal harms. Not only does imprisonment tend to *increase* the risk of someone committing interpersonal harms after release, it is also the direct cause of many interpersonal harms.
Prisons are the sites of many interpersonal harms—rape, torture, abuse, murder—that people would never be subject to without having been imprisoned.
If we’re taking seriously a societal goal of minimizing and redressing interpersonal harms, and the fact that imprisoned people still count as people, and the fact that interpersonal harms committed against them are still “crimes” in our colloquial sense, then we cannot look to prisons as a solution.
We similarly do not need an “alternative” to prisons, because prisons do not exist to solve our problem.