I understand your thoughts on how prison should work. I will give you my opinion on prison and how it can be improved to actually benefit society.
1. I think all judges should have to spend time in prison before they can sentence someone to it. I think they need to understand what aspects of prison work and what aspects don't work. This would also benefit them in seeing what inmates will respond to their sentences.
There are people in prison who just made a mistake, I am not talking about capital offenses. Putting these people people in jail for just a few months will be enough to insure they never commit a crime again. There are many people that are in prison that should be required to not only serve time within a prison wall but also required to spend time in mandatory classes, if they refuse they can spend time in the solitary. This will give the best possible outcome to at least being rehabilitative.
2. There should be no commissary. An inmate who has money on their books just encourages crime behind the prison walls. If an inmate has money on his books and commissary in their cell becomes a target for the person who has nothing. That is typically what caused them to commit a crime on the outside. Prisons are required to deliver what is considered a required level of calories everyday to maintain weight of an average adult. That being said, if you ask an inmate what was for dinner last night they will refer to it as fear factor. Now suppose that you are in prison for a year and you see everyone around you eating potato chips, popcorn, cup of noodles, tuna fish, honey buns, m&m's, ciggarettes, coffee and the like. After a while you are going to try to figure out how you can get some, maybe you will have to offer to do their laundry. Maybe you will have to find the weakest person with commissary and extort them. Guards cannot stop this, they cannot become someones private body guard.
3. Make the circumstances on a daily basis more uncomfortable. One way would be to continually move them through out the prison. When an inmate is assigned to a cell they are usually going to be there for the long haul, meaning could be a month or the rest of their stay. They quickly will learn how to work the cell, pod or dorm they are located in. They will make their friends and they will become comfortable and forget they are in jail. They will have card games, play chess and checkers, they will watch tv together, lift weights, play sports and most of the time they are betting on everything. Inmates will tell you the 2 worst aspects of prison besides the hole are getting moved and shakedowns.
These are only 3 things that would start to change the prison system and you know what, the inmates and their families would never stand for it.
A week inmate who gets extorted usually will not report it because they will be outed, not by the guards but by the investigation that follows. At that point they are in far more danger. Most if not all inmates will tell you that when they go into prison, they have to conform to what it takes to survive.
There are good guards and bad guards. Usually a bad guard is a stickler for the rules, a good guard overlooks inmates being inmates. Bad guards get thrown off of tiers.