And I'm fairly high on the bleeding heart liberal scale but my opinion looking at the crime stats for the US (and other western countries) is that you get the society that you are willing to pay for.
When teachers, social workers, doctors, police, justice systems and prisons cannot teach, help, cure, protect, judge, punish, and rehabilitate people who are not following the laws because there aren't enough of them and they have insufficient resources then this is what you get.
There are people out there who are unintelligent, vulnerable, mentally ill, and occasionally just sociopathic. You need a comprehensive system to try and help those people and protect the rest of society from them.
We've (across the western world) have decided to not put our tax dollars into solving these problems.
Just my 2 cents worth. RIP Mr Lee.