The Carceral System
We built a system that produces criminals and then punishes them for it
We built a system that produces criminals and then punishes them for it.
That's really the whole thesis. But let me walk through it because the more you look at each piece, the worse it gets.
Start with the word itself. "Carceral." Most people don't even know it. They know "prison" and "jail" and "criminal justice system." But "carceral" is the better word because it captures everything — the prisons, the jails, the probation offices, the ankle monitors, the bail bonds, the parole boards, the halfway houses, the sex offender registries, the court fees, the background checks that follow you for decades. It's a system. And it touches way more people than you think.
Something like 1 in 3 American adults has a criminal record. Not 1 in 3 felons. 1 in 3 adults. That's not a justice system catching bad actors. That's a net so wide it's scooping up a third of the country.
So here's where it gets circular.
You grow up poor. Your school is underfunded. Your neighborhood is over-policed. You don't have a dad because he's locked up for something nonviolent that a rich kid would've gotten a warning for. Your mom works two jobs and still can't cover rent. You're 16 and someone offers you a way to make money. You take it. You get caught. Now you have a record.
With that record, you can't get a job. Can't get housing. Can't get federal student aid if it was a drug charge. So what are your options? Go back to the thing that got you the record in the first place. Get caught again. Longer sentence this time.
And somewhere in all of this, a private prison company is making $80 per bed per day. Their investors are happy. Their lobbyists are busy. They need occupancy guarantees written into their government contracts. Let that sink in. The business model requires a steady supply of inmates.
Now compare that to how we handle the same behavior at different income levels.
Rich kid gets caught with coke at a college party? Diversion program, maybe community service, record expunged. Poor kid gets caught with crack on a corner? Mandatory minimum. And we pretend these are the same system applying the same rules.
They're not even pretending anymore, honestly. Everyone kind of knows. It's just that nobody has a clean alternative to point to, so the machine keeps running.
The thing that gets me is the recidivism framing. Politicians love to talk about recidivism like it's a character flaw. "These people just keep reoffending." Yeah. Because you made it impossible for them to do anything else. You stripped them of every legitimate option and then acted surprised when they went back to the illegitimate ones.
It's like breaking someone's legs and then criticizing them for not running a marathon.
And prison itself. What is it actually doing? The stated goals are deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and retribution. Let's score those honestly.
Deterrence: Exposed as mostly BS by decades of research. People committing crimes are generally not doing cost-benefit analyses. They're desperate, impulsive, addicted, mentally ill, or some combination. The threat of prison doesn't enter the equation when you can't feed your kids.
Incapacitation: Sure, a person in a cage can't commit crimes against the general public. But they can commit them against other inmates, and they can come out more criminal than they went in. So you're really just delaying and compounding the problem.
Rehabilitation: In most American prisons? Laughable. Overcrowded, understaffed, violent. The "programs" that exist are underfunded and oversubscribed. You're more likely to join a gang for protection than join a job training program.
Retribution: This is the one that actually works as intended. We are punishing people. Congratulations. We're very good at making people suffer. That's the one goal we're nailing.
Other countries figured this out, by the way. Norway's recidivism rate is around 20%. America's is north of 70%. Norway treats inmates like humans who will eventually return to society. America treats them like garbage and then releases them into a world that treats them like garbage too. The results are exactly what you'd predict.
But we can't do what Norway does because — and this is the real answer, not the stated one — too many people are making money off the current system. Guards' unions. Private prison operators. Bail bond companies. Phone companies charging $1 a minute for inmate calls. Commissary vendors. Ankle monitor companies. It's an industry. And industries don't voluntarily dismantle themselves.
So what do you do?
I genuinely don't know the full answer. But I know a few things that are true simultaneously:
- Some people are genuinely dangerous and need to be separated from society.
- Most people in prison are not those people.
- The system as designed does not distinguish well between those groups.
- Poverty is the single greatest predictor of incarceration, which tells you this is an economic problem wearing a moral costume.
- Every dollar spent on early childhood education, mental health services, addiction treatment, and housing stability prevents more crime than a dollar spent on prisons. We have the data on this. We just don't have the political will.
The carceral system isn't broken. That implies it once worked and something went wrong. It's functioning exactly as designed — to warehouse the poor, to profit off their confinement, and to make the rest of us feel safe without actually making us safer.
Until we're honest about that, nothing changes.