Your way of thinking probably explains as well why the US is #1 in prisoners-per-capita.
Imprisonment removes your freedom. This should be punishment enough. Once you are in there, the idea is not to get you even more agitated or depressed. Rehabilitation comes with providing perhaps even things to which you didn't have access in the first place and led you to crime.
Of course in theory it's easy to generalize and philosofize. But still, trying to make a troubled individual's environment troubling, really has poor chances of solving the trouble.
We're leaving a lot more up to the Iraqis than we did with, say, Japan after WWII. Japan is actually a very respectable part of the world community today, despite the kind of atrocities they were committing during WWII. We used a heavy hand in the aftermath. We're using a much lighter hand in post-war Iraq.
We'll have to see if that pays off.
It's convenient to rationalise the destruction caused by the iraq war on the basis of we-are-leaving-so-many-things-behind, when in reality:
Not all of it is high school calc. IIRC the integral of 4sin(x)/x has to be solved with Taylor series, and I only got those in the second semester of university calculus.
It's 2nd semester univ.calculus if you are from the US. In some countries it's indeed high school math.
Who are these guys anyway? You expect better from NIST.
They are the same guys who came up with this piece of scientific work
Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the Sun.