Is it terrible? If we were to remove the system and keep it gone for some set amount of time, once people realize it was really gone, would crimes not come back?
We can compare to other countries and see their rates of crime, but such comparisons are difficult to make accurately because you are judging all social differences at once, not just a different legal system. Including things like how much lead has the population been exposed to, effect of poverty and sense of community. Things far beyond the legal system.
>Have all of the people scammed been brought whole?
Can you ever make them whole? Even if you pay them back all their money, there is the period of time without, the fear and pain from losing it, and similar that cannot be undone. For other crimes, there is often a victim whose state can never be fully reverted. If this is our view of justice, then justice becomes an impossible thing which can never be achieved. Does such a stance risk people eventually no longer chasing what can never be acquired?
If our society decides it is necessary to act with the full weight of the law behind it, then it would seem better to have the information available for the public to verify than not. I'm not saying it is all great, but that it is far better to have information available so that things like average sentence length for a given crime based on demographic and psychographic information can be queried by all. If a city that is 50/50 male/female and 20/80 black/non-black finds their speeding tickets are 70/30 male female and 35/65 black/non-black, then it may be worth investigating to see if police are being fair who they give warnings to, who gets reduces tickets, and who gets neither.
As for major privacy concerns, it is generally the more major crimes that have the larger issue with the victim being known. Knowing that some one was the victim of mischief vandalism is far less a privacy invasion than knowing they were the victim of sexual assault of a child (and even hiding the victim's identity often doesn't do more than hide the name from a passive search).
Then there are the benefits that other posters have raised, such as being useful for knowing past decisions used even in minor trials.
We can compare to other countries and see their rates of crime, but such comparisons are difficult to make accurately because you are judging all social differences at once, not just a different legal system. Including things like how much lead has the population been exposed to, effect of poverty and sense of community. Things far beyond the legal system.