I ran across a video of a guy talking about the interconnection between education and incarceration. In rapid fire succession he noted that 2 out of 3 kids who cannot read proficiently at a 4th grade level end up in jail, prison, or on welfare; some 80 percent plus of all teens who go through the juvenile justice system are functionally illiterate; some 70 percent of all inmates today cannot read above a 4th grade level: and a teen daughter is some 6 times more likely to become pregnant if she cannot read at a 4th grade level. The bottom line is this, if you are cognitively unprepared or undeveloped for the modern world, you are likely to fall by the wayside and in a big way.

Some of you will argue that Donald Trump did rather well with a reading and speaking capability estimated to be at the 5th grade level. Thus, education may not be all that critical. But he is not a good example. After all, he started out with $400 million plus from his dad (back when that was real money) and still managed to stumble into a half-dozen or so bankruptcies. He even bankrupted a casino, which is extremely hard to do. Currently, he is running one more time for the Presidency primarily, many speculate, to avoid jail time for the first set of felonies on which he has been convicted. Other convictions are likely to follow. Most poor persons of color cannot inherit huge fortunes nor borrow large sums from Russia to stay afloat. They make it or break on their own. Sadly, too many are ensnared in our nefarious, Byzantine, and failed systems … especially the so-called justice system.

I can recall one of the hundreds of brown-bags I attended while working at the University. The presenter over- viewed her research on the criminal justice system. She looked at each key decision point in the system from issuing a warrant to arrest, arraignment, negotiations, sentencing, release, parole, and reincarnation. At every such point, people of color fared worse. It was as if there was some form of systemic adverse racial treatment operated here. How shocking! How utterly predictable!

Next I read The Many Lives of Mama Love. This memoir was written by Lara Love Hardin, a well educated white women who ran afoul of our broken justice system as a result of going astray with drugs early in life. She made it back to a full life as a successful and best-selling author as well as a CEO of her own literary agency. But her time being ensnared in the tentacles of our justice system trapped her in the depths of despair, almost breaking her. At her worst moment, it led her to the precipice of despair and suicide. One book she later co-authored was about a man who spent almost three decades on Alabama’s death row before he was exonerated. How many innocent people are murdered unjustly in the so-called name of justice.

The tragedy of our criminal justice system is reflected in the fact that we have more of our citizens incarcerated in jails and prisons than anyone else. Our 2 million plus prisoners represent one-quarter of the world’s total, even though our proportion of the globe’s population is about 7 percent of the total. Our per-capita rate of individuals behind bars was 629 per 100,000 people in 2021 (according to the World Prison Brief) … the highest among civilized nations by far. At the least, this is a costly failure. At one point, the cost of being incarcerated in a maximum security slammer rivaled that of financing a Harvard education, though schooling may have shot ahead in recent years. Nevertheless, stuffing people in cages takes a lot of money.

I’ve oft wondered why this is so … why do we have so much crime as suggested by our numbers living in cages? Why are there so many who apparently have failed the most basic test of citizenship by not playing by the rules? Perhaps it has something to do with our hyper-inequality of income, wealth, and opportunity. Money and its obsequious display are worshipped here at the same time as societies’ goodies are redistributed more and more toward the top of the pyramid. Worse, the ability of those at the bottom to ascend the socio-econonic ladder has become increasingly more difficult as the cost of upward mobility (e.g. good educations) exceed available resources for too many youth. Want the American dream, I say often, go to a Scandinavian country.

But let’s back away from the big explanations for a moment. Let’s forget about bothersome facts such as living in a society that encourages having more guns than people out on our streets. Or let’s not dwell on the systemic failing of American culture that favors punishment over habilitation to motivate proper behavior. We have an unstated ethos that people are essentially evil (and some undoubtedly are) and that only the harshest treatment of real and suspected miscreants can secure the safety of society. Thus, we have a long history of employing fear and even state-sanctioned killing to ensure acceptable behaviors. Yet, homicides and criminality often are highest in those states with the harshest laws based on a retributional perspective of human nature.

Moreover, our culture stresses a virulent form of individualism where all are expected to achieve success (or overcome adversity) on their own. It is a weakness to seek help from the government, and it is a drain on so-called scarce resources. We seem less bothered that others who are more fortunate can buy success or evade the consequences of bad choices if, of course, they can pay for those things on their own. The concept of public goods (like access to medical care and higher education and good legal representation) are undeveloped in this land of opportunity.

We seem to easily forget that investments in the young, starting with universal pre-natal care, quality child care, excellent early education for all, and prevention of problems is much better than harsh interventions after the issues are fully manifest in counter-productive behaviors. In consequence, we are beginning to lose the global competitive race because we are not investing fully in the next generation. We once had the premier education system in the world. Now, we are diverting resources from such critical needs under the absurd assumption that the top of the economic pyramid is not getting enough of the economic pie. The hard right argues we should divert even more from public needs to further augment the wellbeing of the uber wealthy. Hell, the share of the pie going to the 1 percent has gone from about 10 percent of the total to about 25 percent since the start of Reaganomics. This tectonic redistribution of resources represents a fundamental shift in our culture and our values … and not in a good direction.

Some of our failings might well be attributed to specific public decisions (discrete policies). These are things more easily righted. For example, after the Voting Rights legislation of the 1960s resulted in Black Americans exercising their franchise rights in larger numbers, a scheme (purportedly initiated in the Nixon White House) of voter suppression emerged. Through tacit understandings, the judicial system found ways to increase the penalties and legal punishments on drug use that disproportionately impacted communities of color. Though most drugs found their ways into White communities (that’s where the money was), most who were caught up in the system were not White. And guess what, felons could not vote. How convenient for the traditional holders of power … those at the bottom were disenfranchised in yet another way. That is a conscious and systemic societal failure.

Once an individual is in that system, the rules and protocols make it near impossible to escape. Lara Love Hardin, author of Mama Loves, was the right color, was very talented, and already had an education before she ran afoul of the system. Yet, she almost buckled in the face of the insane and contradictory demands she faced. On parole, she faced a bewildering array of competing and conflicting demands among institutional silos operating in isolated ways though theoretically functioning within the same system.

It was as if no one understood that there was no coherent system nor cared about those caught up in it. Lara desperately tried to be in two or three places at the same time to please her parol officers, the criminal court, and the family court. She lived in constant fear of going back to jail or losing custody of her youngest child, or both. And there seemed to be no one to help nor help her make sense of the bizarre world in which she was trapped.

Everyone in the system wanted to maximize their success no matter the overall cost. For example, DAs wanted to clear cases. So, they piled on unsolved crimes to available criminals awaiting adjudication while promising even lighter sentences if they went along with this scam. That helped them look better while not serving justice one whit. Prisons were busting at the seams at the same time that for-profit incarceration models made it economically advantageous to maximize prison populations, at least in some cases. Looking from the outside, it is a system absent an overall purpose and rationale. It resembles more closely a complex array of separately moving parts operating from decidedly distinct purposes and cultures.

Many years ago, during my professional career, my colleague (Jennifer Noyes, now right hand person to the University of Wisconsin Chancellor) and I spent a fair amount of time working with human service programs. In particular, we oft worked with welfare programs as they shifted from handing out money to moving vulnerable persons into employment and productive roles in society. Officials running these systems initially wandered about in confusion and disarray during this period of change.

As we consulted with a number of them across the country, we developed what we called the line-of-sight exercise. We would walk through the client’s experience in the current system (from the customer’s perspective), continuously asking officials what they really wanted to accomplish at each key point. Discrepancies between intent and actuality oft led to dramatic rearrangements in responsibilities, roles, and structures. Most of all, it became apparent that new cultures were required. We saw some amazing changes … new collaborative arrangements among what had been competing (or at least unaligned) systems. We put together welfare-work models that became inspirations around the country and even internationally.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could do that on a larger scale. Wouldn’t it be great if someone could reimagine the justice system (or non-system) from the viewpoint of those caught up in it. Even better, how about doing a form of line-of-sight exercise for our American society? Perhaps we just might reimagine the kind of world we want, not the one we have.

Just imagine that.