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.
And the argument goes one level deeper than the budget. It isn't only that we chose to fund the cell version — it's that across most American residential land, the living version is illegal to build: minimum unit sizes, parking counted per door, caps on unrelated adults sharing a home. Punishment is allowed. The opposite needs a variance.
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.