> Criminals have to want to stop doing crime before they can be rehabilitated

This is literally what rehabiliation entails. Convincing criminals that they have better options than crime.

It doesn't work for everyone. There are absolutely bad people who will just violate social contracts, or who can't control their rage turning into violence. Those people need to be incapacitated. But for the vast majority of criminals, particularly non-violent criminals, crime is an economic cost-benefit exercise.

On top of that: the US has ~5% of the world's population but ~25% of the world's prisoners. So when we talk about "criminals", most of the people we're referring to are only incarcerated because they're subject to the US carceral system. If they lived in any other country, they'd considered upstanding citizens.