"Right. Lock 'em up and throw away the key, let them be raped and beaten and damaged some more. Crazy shmazy. Lets take damaged human beings and damage them some more, and then let them back out. Sure, that'll work out well."

You're right, that is off topic. But to answer your concern, I am all in favor of reforming the penal system so that human beings are not damaged further. And I have argued that American prisons be re-designed into mental health institutions that focus on rehabilitation, rather than just human storage. The prison system in Japan is designed to rehabilitate its prisoners so that they can be re-incorporated back into society, and Japan has a low recidivism rate due to its system. But I do not want to see dangerous criminals, with high rate of recidivism, put back on the streets anytime soon, especially if they have not received adequate rehabilitation. Rehabilitation is really not a priority of the American prison system, and prisoners that have made a successful transition to functional citizen (prisoners that are the exception to the norm), for the most part, got their rehabilitation at their own initiative (and often at their own expense).

Address the concern of the lack of rehabilitation services in American prisons, before you address the concerns of long prison terms, because recidivism is going to make long prison stays, only with more victims, whether you like it or not.

"I am still within my rights and that shouldn't be held against me, even should I happen to commit a crime against a bully."

In the defense of your action, the defense to use was that you used forced to defend yourself from the bully or to prevent the bully from causing harm to other person.

That is the first rule in military's use of force doctrine. We don't kill people because we hate them, we kill people to prevent them from harming others. I have fought a lot of bullies, and though I did hate them, I did not fight them because I hated them, I fought them to stop them from bullying people.

The first lesson everyone who is interest in learning martial arts learns, is the story of the samurai whose wife was brutally raped and murdered. The samurai tracked down his wife's murderer, but just when the samurai was about extract justice on his wife's behalf, the murderer spit in the samurai's face. The samurai stopped what he was doing, and walked away. "Why," people asked. Because the murderer made the samurai angry by spitting in his face, and the samurai could not act upon his anger.

If your motive is something other than defense or justice, then it is unacceptable to use that motive to act violently. Arguments about vigilante justice can be raised for and against it; citizens can make arrest, and citizens can collect evidence as long as they do so within legal means (but if a white supremacist group raped or killed any of my family members, I would track them down and probably do something potentially illegal in the name of justice). And you always have the right to defend yourself or others.