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The System Isn’t Broken—It’s Working Exactly as Designed

I’ve spent most of my life trying to make sense of pain. Not just personal pain, but systemic pain—the kind that repeats itself like a disease passed down, not through genetics, but through policies, profit, and indifference. And lately, I can’t stop thinking about how the so-called “justice system” in America operates.

People talk about crime and punishment like it’s a simple equation. Do something bad, serve your time. But we all know it doesn’t end there. What happens after prison is rarely talked about by those not directly impacted. And it should be.

Because that’s where the cycle begins again.

Let’s be real: If you commit a crime in this country, especially something serious, you don’t just "pay your debt to society" and move on. You get locked up. You’re handed to a system that profits off your pain and calls it justice. You scrub floors, work for pennies, serve your sentence—often under inhumane conditions. You pay restitution. Fines. Court costs. And when you finally get out? Guess what. The system’s not done with you yet.

You’re told you’re “free,” but you’re shackled with parole fees, drug tests you have to pay for, ankle monitors you rent, documents you need to rebuild your life that you can’t afford. And let’s face it—who’s hiring a convicted felon at a livable wage? So what do people do? They fall behind. They miss payments. They violate parole. They end up back inside.
And just like that, the system wins again. It eats them alive—again—and makes more money doing it.

But what I really don’t understand—what makes me sick to my stomach—is this: Why does the system get the money at all? Why does a person who murders, rapes, or assaults someone end up paying the state? Why does the government benefit financially from someone taking a human life? Why does it profit when someone molests a child?

Shouldn’t that money—if it even exists—go to the victims? Shouldn’t the family of the murdered mother and father be compensated for the trauma, the therapy bills, the empty chairs at every holiday dinner table? Shouldn’t the survivor of sexual violence receive restitution that actually helps them survive?

But no. Unless you’re lucky enough to afford a lawyer and drag yourself through a grueling civil case (where you’ll have to relive your trauma in public over and over again), you get nothing. The criminal "pays their debt" to the system—not the people they destroyed.

And that’s just the surface.

Let Me Show You How This System Makes Victims—Over and Over Again

Picture this. (If you're thinking Golden Girls right now in the midst of this intense post; we should be friends)

A five-year-old girl watches both of her parents get murdered in front of her by a stranger. Her entire world is shattered in seconds. She has no family left—no one to scoop her up, tell her she's safe, or hold her when she screams in her sleep.

The intruder goes to prison. Maybe even for life. And the system starts collecting its cut.

The girl? She gets tossed into foster care.

And I’ve worked as a foster care case manager. I’ve seen what happens behind those closed doors. I've watched the system repeatedly stop me from doing my job.

Most foster homes are not built on love or healing. They're built on checks. The state cuts a check, and a child is placed—traumatized, grieving, confused, and often not wanted. That little girl bounces from home to home because she has “behavioral issues.” Of course she does—she watched her parents be murdered. But no one helps her with that. Instead, she hears grown adults complain to her therapist that she’s "too much," that she’s a "bad kid," that they “can’t handle her.”

By the time she’s in middle school, she’s self-harming. She’s starving herself. She’s drinking, using drugs, smoking anything she can find to numb the bottomless ache in her chest. And no one sees it. No one wants to.

At 18, the check stops. So does the roof over her head. She’s homeless, addicted, broken, traumatized, and completely alone.

Maybe you see her next on TikTok. Bent over on a sidewalk. A needle in her arm. Dirty hoodie. Vacant eyes. Just another “junkie” to scroll past.

But I see a little girl who needed someone to love her when the world fell apart.

Who Made the Money in This Story?

  • The state got funding for every day she was in foster care.
  • Multiple foster parents got paid to keep her for a few months at a time while blaming her for her trauma.
  • Doctors made money off her ER visits.
  • Rehab centers billed for her failed detoxes.
  • Jails booked her for petty theft to feed her addiction.
  • The prison industrial complex profited off her pain.

And she?

She died at 35.

Alone.

The system didn’t just fail her. It used her. It wrung every cent it could out of her suffering and then tossed her away like she never mattered.

The System Isn’t Broken. It’s Built This Way.

I know people don’t want to hear this. It’s easier to believe in a system that punishes “bad guys” and protects “good ones.” But that’s not what this is. This system was never built to heal. It was built to harvest.

Harvest labor. Harvest money. Harvest lives.

We live in a country where prisons are for profit. Where foster care is incentivized. Where trauma is monetized. And where victims are blamed, ignored, or revictimized.

You can call it a system. I call it a machine.

And this machine doesn’t care about people like you or me. It cares about revenue.

I’m Tired of Being “Awake”

I wish I didn’t see all this. I wish I could scroll through the world and just feel normal. But I’m awake. And honestly, I hate it.

I walk around in a fog of disgust most days. I see pain where others see laziness. I see addiction where others see worthlessness. I see trauma where others see “bad behavior.” And I see patterns that repeat and repeat and repeat—generation after generation.

And when people like me try to speak out, try to fight back, try to change things?

We get labeled. Dismissed. Or worse—threatened with the very system we’re trying to change.

Sometimes I wonder if I’ll end up in jail someday. Not for doing something wrong, but for daring to challenge what’s always been accepted. For refusing to shut up. For refusing to look away.

Because I’m done with the bullshit.

Are you?

If You’re Still Reading This…

If you’ve ever looked around and felt disgusted, disillusioned, or heartbroken—you’re not alone. If you’ve ever screamed into the void wondering how this country got so good at profiting off pain, you’re not crazy. And if you’ve ever been part of this system—as a victim, a survivor, or just someone caught in the gears—I see you.

And I won’t stop speaking.

Because the truth is this: The system doesn’t need to be fixed. It needs to be dismantled.

And we can’t do that with silence.

We do it by sharing the stories they try to bury. By honoring the victims they ignore. By refusing to call exploitation “justice.”

We do it by waking each other up.

One painful truth at a time.



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