No, they have. Why do you think were are so many homeless people living in encampments in LA and Portland? Why do you think recent bail reform and changing of sentencing laws in some states has lead to some criminals offending 20 times in a row and being released and groups of looters stealing less than $999 worth of goods from stores, only to have those stores shutdown because they can't operate?

They're trying, but their policies are just failing because they tend to operate from the perspective of "People are inherently good, it's the system that makes them bad", which I doubt is true because essentially we're all animals who can (sometimes) employ bursts of logic but are decently driven by emotion.

(I can't quantify if all of them are but these are the most visible and detrimental outcomes.)

And yet, improving those other metrics never really seems to have the same effect as taking criminals off the streets, now does it?

This is what I never quite understood: I agree that if you change all aspects of society, there may very well be a flow on effect into other apeexts (like crime), but what you're talking about is a large percentage of change that isn't feasible, so inevitably it falls flat.

Maybe because trying to change 20 different things at once equates to far more effort and complex interplay in society than just "lock them up".

So unless you want to be tracked and metricised every step of your lives, I'm afraid raising every measure of a society isn't feasible.

But is this a case of "true reform hasn't been tried yet"? Because I can assure you that it has.