Prisons, not pools
From Make America Dream Again — the ethos under the house. One human's voice. No lying.
Here's a thing we're genuinely world-class at: caging humans. Highest incarceration rate on the planet — more people in cells than any country, anywhere. And the public pools? We drained them. In a lot of towns literally — filled them with concrete rather than share them once everyone was allowed in. We had the money. We always had the money. We just decided cages were a better buy than cannonballs.
That's not my metaphor — it's documented. Heather McGhee's The Sum of Us lays it out: the drained pool is the whole story of American public goods. Faced with sharing the nice thing, we'd rather destroy the nice thing — and call it freedom. Spite as a budget line.
So follow the gross part — who profits? And here's the trap: it's bigger than the easy target. Private prisons are only about 8% of it — the other ~92% is public, which means the machine that needs the cells full isn't just a few shareholders. It's sentencing politics, prison-town payrolls, the contractors, and the phone and commissary vultures who gouge the poorest families across public and private alike. A cell only earns when it's full, so a whole web of interests learned to keep it full. Gross is the exact right word, and the rot runs wider than the 8% everyone likes to point at.
And it's the same math as the pool and the ICU: a prison cell is just a pool that didn't get built. A kid swimming at 3pm is a kid who isn't in a cell at 30. Drain the prisons. Fill the pools. Spend it on the block.
If the sentence ever feels like it wants to end — in the US, call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline), any hour; or find help anywhere at findahelpline.com. You are not alone, and the story isn’t over.