Convicted for the Crimes of Others: The Legalized Injustice That Is Destroying America From Within

It is one of the darkest truths in modern American life: in the so-called “land of the free,” you can be imprisoned for decades—not for what you did, but for what someone else did.

You can lose your home, your family, your job, your pets, your freedom, and your mental health—because someone else made a terrible decision and you were nearby, or loosely affiliated, or just unlucky enough to be caught in the net.

And worse still? It was legal.

This is not just injustice. It is engineered, codified, systemic injustice—injustice dressed up in a robe, wielding a gavel, funded by taxpayers, and called “law.”

The Natural and Probable Consequences doctrine, along with its cousin felony murder, allowed prosecutors to convict people for murder without proving intent, without proving action, and in many cases, without even proving knowledge.

These doctrines were not passed by legislatures.

They were invented by courts. Weaponized. And used to fill prisons with people who, in many cases, did not commit the crime for which they were convicted.

They were there. They were associated. They should have known what might happen.

That is the level of evidence we used to end lives.

What got into the courts? It wasn’t wisdom or caution. It was fear. It was political pressure. It was the desire to control what couldn’t be fully controlled—crime, chaos, community collapse—and the ugly willingness to sacrifice people to manufacture the illusion of safety.

We turned prosecutors into politicians, and judges into enablers.

We turned trials into performance, and punishment into sport.

We didn’t reform neighborhoods or invest in prevention—we invented doctrines to punish proximity. We didn’t need proof of intent; we just needed someone to blame.

The result? A nation that cages more of its own people than any other country on earth.

The United States has just over 4% of the world’s population—and about 25% of its incarcerated people.

That is not because Americans are uniquely violent. It is because our legal system is uniquely designed to incarcerate.

We punished people two for one—not just the person who pulled the trigger, but the one who was in the car, or standing on the corner, or too scared to intervene.

And we didn’t stop with punishment.

We made them work.

Under the 13th Amendment’s exception clause, we legally enslaved them—stripped of rights, forced into labor, paid pennies for their time, beaten or written up if they refused.

What kind of country does that?

What kind of system trades due process for political points?

What kind of justice is this?

Let’s not sugarcoat it.

When government agents use invented legal doctrines to convict citizens they know didn’t actually commit the crime, and then send them to prison to work under the banner of “corrections,” that’s not just injustice.

It’s state-sponsored human trafficking.

It’s corruption in a robe.

It’s modern-day slavery, legalized through bad law.

And it doesn’t end when the sentence ends.

Once released, the formerly incarcerated face the stigma of a record. They lose access to jobs. To housing.

To healthcare. Many lose contact with their children. They are marked—not just socially, but economically and politically.

And many return to crime not because they are evil, but because the system has cut off every other option.

We have created a permanent underclass of scarred citizens.

And we call this justice.

Now, imagine the cruelty of sending these same people—already wrongfully convicted, already broken by the system—to El Salvador, as proposed by former President Donald Trump.

A nation known for overcrowded hellholes of human suffering, for prisons stacked with bodies, for beatings, disease, starvation, and silence.

You take someone legally wrongfully convicted in the U.S.—already punished for the crime of another—and you banish them to a foreign prison to rot?

That’s not just cruel. It’s evil.

It’s banishment without trial. Torture without accountability. Exile for the convenience of a political message.

And what’s worse? These same politicians know many of the incarcerated never committed the actual crime.

But they do it anyway. Why?

Because there’s profit in punishment. Votes in toughness. Promotions in high conviction rates.

Justice was never the goal. Control was.

Truth was inconvenient.

And humanity? Optional.

The courts betrayed us.

The prosecutors hunted us. The prisons profited off of us.

And we, the taxpayers, footed the bill.

We paid to traumatize people.

We paid to destroy families.

We paid $132,000 a year in California alone to keep one person locked in a trauma chamber.

This is more than a broken system.

It is a system built to break people.

But we can change it. And we must.

We must:

      •     End guilt-by-association doctrines.

      •     Review and reverse wrongful convictions.

      •     Abolish the 13th Amendment’s exception clause.

      •     Shift from punishment to repair, from mass incarceration to mass healing.

We must stop accepting injustice simply because it’s been normalized.

We must start demanding truth—even when it’s uncomfortable, especially when it’s overdue.

This nation cannot heal while it legalizes harm.

And no justice system should be built on the suffering of the innocent.

It’s time to stop caging people for what someone else did.

It’s time to stop hiding injustice behind procedure.

And it’s time for every person in power who upheld this to feel the shame that justice demands.