"Your answer to them is, effectively, to create, offer and support a system that tortures the few of these guys you manage to catch *after* they commit these crimes"
Well, that is better than catching them *before* they commit these crimes. The record of anti-social profiling is well-established now: the crapulous prejudices of probation officers.
Retributive justice is as primitive as the exchange-based societies in which it flourishes; but attempts to drop a "rational" system of reforming deviance on top of a necessarily blind market system only creates a more powerful repressive order. This point was indicated by Yevgeny Pashukanis in his critique of Hans Kelsen's legal positivism (In The General Theory of Law and Marxism, Pluto Press)
It is demonstrated in practice, here in Britain, by the manifest failure of the 'anti-social behaviour order' (ASBO). The ASBO was supposed to put policing anti-social behaviour on a rational footing by governing patterns of behanviour rather than waiting for people to commit more extreme crimes. Under the ASBO local authorities propose special laws to govern youths' actions: we have courts writing specific orders forbidding twins to be together, or banning the wearing of baseball caps in the vicinity of certain town centres, many orders with attached maps showing where people can go and at what time. All of this overbearing nonsense was put in place to achieve a rational, non-punitive ordering of anti-social behaviour. Of course, it is all deeply irrational.
It might seem wrong to wait for people to commit crimes before punishing them, but that is a condition of individual liberty: to be free to choose what you do, you have to be at liberty to do wrong, as well as right. Punishing people after the event might seem medieval, but it does at least have the virtue of taking their choices seriously.