A more explicit phrasing of the argument may be that structural explanations better explain a phenomena than unique individual factors, and that the &quot;unique&quot; individual factors might not be that unique.<p>So what you end up punishing is (personal factors) x (structural factors), but we don&#x27;t get to know how much each weigh. If we&#x27;re using punishment or removal of a human from society as a way of getting rid of bad social phenomena rooted in bad personal factors, then it&#x27;s in our interest to punish uniquely bad personal factors, or else common personal factors interacting with a bad situation will continue to output bad social phenomena.<p>Additionally, structural fixes seem to me like lower-hanging policy fruit than throwing a person in jail and subjecting them to severe financial disadvantage. Society&#x27;s fixes for individual behavior are crude, and quality human resources are extremely finite and being spent elsewhere. But for our emotional sense of justice we look for the high-hanging fruits first.<p>And let&#x27;s say among the bad personal factors population there are gradients of badness. Why do we seek to irritate that badness by exacerbating structural factors of crime, i.e., by throwing them into an awfully managed and abusive system where they don&#x27;t get real sustained access to professionals, and why do we financially impair them?