The Business of Human Suffering: America’s Obsession with Excessive Sentencing

America does not have a justice system. It has a punishment economy. A sprawling, multi-billion-dollar industry designed to entrench suffering, not prevent crime. A system that siphons public money into the pockets of prison guards, bureaucrats, and private vendors while locking away the poor, the mentally ill, and the addicted—not because they are irredeemable, but because their incarceration is profitable.

We are in an economic crisis. Housing is unaffordable. Healthcare is a luxury. Education is riddled with debt traps. And yet, we spend over $80 billion a year maintaining a human warehouse system that manufactures violence and recidivism at staggering rates. Instead of investing in housing, healthcare, education, or job programs, our government spends $132,000 a year per inmate in California alone to keep people locked in cages, where they are beaten, raped, overmedicated, underfed, and dehumanized.

The justification for this has always been safety. But what safety was secured by locking Scott Smith in a cage for 27 years under a Three Strikes law that treated his meth addiction as a capital offense? He was sentenced to life without parole (LWOP) in the 1990s for being caught with meth three times—because our system viewed his personal struggle with addiction as more worthy of death-by-incarceration than rehabilitation. He was released only in 2024 after decades in a state-run drug-infested hellscape, one that exacerbated his suffering rather than solved any public safety problem.

How does it serve public safety to sentence a man like Shawn Rodriguez—who never committed murder—to spend his entire life in prison based on a legal technicality? The same system that overturns wrongful convictions every day refuses to acknowledge its own failures, trapping men like Shawn inside forever because admitting fault would mean accountability, and accountability would mean change.

What about Ezra Williams, sentenced to 51 years to life for armed robbery with a BB gun? Nobody died. Nobody was permanently harmed. Yet taxpayers will spend millions keeping him behind bars rather than acknowledging that poverty and desperation—not some innate criminality—led to his actions.

These sentences are not about safety. They are about power, money, and control. They are about protecting the invisible economy of mass incarceration—one that feeds off the bodies of the poor like a grotesque parasite.

The Silent Participants in This Machine

The most chilling part? The judges, prosecutors, and lawmakers who know this is wrong but continue to perpetuate it. How many judges have mechanically handed down life sentences under mandatory minimums, shrugging, as if the destruction of a human life is just another case file? How many prosecutors have treated victory in court as more important than justice itself? How many politicians have pandered to the prison guards’ union, allowing policies that enrich state employees at the expense of human freedom?

They tell us we need more incarceration while slashing funding for public defenders, mental health care, and drug treatment. They take people whose only real crime was being poor or sick and lock them in concrete tombs for decades, ensuring that when they are finally released—if they ever are—they will be broken beyond repair.

The True Cost of This Madness

Beyond the trillions of dollars wasted, the real cost is human. The families torn apart. The children growing up without parents. The souls who die slow deaths in cement boxes, forgotten and discarded.

The economic argument alone should be enough to end this insanity. We are paying to punish people for the crime of being disadvantaged when we could be paying to rehabilitate them. We could redirect these funds toward mental health care, addiction treatment, education, and job programs that actually reduce crime.

But that would require confronting the truth: our system is not broken. It is designed to be this way.

America is not interested in rehabilitation. America is interested in punishment for profit. The courts function as bureaucratic rubber stamps to keep the machine running. The prison system is a for-profit enterprise that feeds off pain. And those who dare to challenge it—those who demand humanity, logic, and fairness—are silenced, ignored, or labeled as radical.

The question is: how much longer will we allow this? How much more human life must be destroyed before we recognize that our so-called justice system is nothing more than a glorified system of legal human trafficking?

If this country truly believes in justice, then excessive sentencing must end. If we truly care about safety, we must invest in people—not prisons. And if we want to build a future worth living in, we must dismantle this monstrous industry that feeds on suffering and build something new, something just, something humane.

Because right now, our justice system isn’t just failing—it’s committing crimes of its own.