Justice Unshackled: Is the U.S. Prison System Broken or Designed This Way?

For years, I believed the system that held me was broken. From the inside, it felt like a chaotic, dysfunctional machine, chewing up lives through incompetence and neglect. It was a narrative of failure, of a good idea—justice—gone horribly wrong. But the deeper I dig, the more I speak with experts, and the more I confront the history of this nation, the more I’m forced to ask a more unsettling question: What if the system isn’t broken at all? What if it’s working exactly as intended?

This is the sixth installment in our journey together at Justice Unshackled. We began this series with a mission: to pull back the curtain on the American prison system and foster a meaningful dialogue about reform.¹ We’ve explored the forgotten lives in the juvenile justice system, where childhood is criminalized and futures are extinguished before they can begin.² We’ve examined the unique and brutal challenges faced by our LGBTQ+ siblings behind bars, whose very identities are targeted and erased.³ We’ve confronted the compounded injustices faced by incarcerated women, a system that punishes motherhood and ignores trauma.⁴ And we’ve laid bare the undeniable intersection of race and poverty, a toxic nexus that serves as the primary fuel for the engine of mass incarceration.⁵

Each of these explorations pointed not to isolated malfunctions, but to deep, structural patterns. The same themes of control, marginalization, and exploitation echoed through every corridor of the system we examined. Now, we must connect those threads. We must look at the machine itself—not just its broken parts, but its very blueprint.

The purpose of this essay is to deconstruct the American carceral state from its historical foundations to its modern economic and political mechanics. The evidence, as we will see, suggests a chilling conclusion. The system’s most glaring “flaws”—its staggering racial disparities, its deep-seated economic exploitation, and its relentlessly punitive nature—are not bugs. They are features. They reveal a system meticulously designed not for justice or rehabilitation, but for social control and profit.

The Blueprint of Control: Historical Foundations of American Incarceration

To understand the architecture of today’s mass incarceration, we must begin at the foundation. The American system of punishment did not spring into existence fully formed; it evolved, adapting its methods and philosophies over centuries. Yet a single, unbroken thread runs through this history: the use of the justice system as a tool to control and extract value from marginalized populations. From the public stocks of the colonial era to the sprawling prison plantations of the post-Civil War South, the design has always been rooted in a hierarchy of power and a definition of who is, and is not, fully human.

From Public Shaming to the Penitentiary: The Evolving Philosophy of Punishment

In the early American colonies, punishment was a public spectacle, a brutal and direct assertion of social order inherited from English common law.⁶ The stocks, the whipping post, and the public hanging were not hidden away; they were community events designed to shame the offender and deter the onlooker.⁷ Justice was retributive, immediate, and deeply personal. The idea of locking someone away for years as the primary form of punishment was largely foreign.

This philosophy began to shift in the late 18th century, influenced by Enlightenment ideals and the religious fervor of groups like the Quakers. Reformers argued that crime was a moral failing that could be corrected. They envisioned a new kind of institution, one designed not just for punishment but for penance. It was from this ideal that the "penitentiary" was born—a place where an individual, through isolation, reflection, and labor, could become penitent and reform their soul.⁶ This introduced a fundamental duality into the American correctional psyche that persists to this day: the often-conflicting goals of retribution and rehabilitation.

However, this rehabilitative ideal was swiftly corrupted by economic and social realities. Long before the Civil War, a brutal system of for-profit penal servitude was already thriving in the industrializing North. States like New York and Illinois discovered that the labor of their incarcerated populations—mostly poor white and immigrant men—could be sold to private contractors.¹⁰ These contractors set up factories within prison walls, using forced labor to produce goods while the state collected the profits. This northern model of industrial penal servitude was deeply punitive, with guards authorized to use extreme violence and prisoners stripped of nearly all rights.¹⁰ This inconvenient history shatters the myth of a purely rehabilitative North in contrast to a punitive South; it reveals that the exploitation of incarcerated bodies for profit was a national, not a regional, concept from the very beginning.

Slavery by Another Name: The 13th Amendment and Its Legacy

The true architectural blueprint for modern mass incarceration was laid in 1865. The 13th Amendment to the Constitution is celebrated for abolishing slavery, but its text contains a catastrophic exception, a loophole that would condemn millions to a new form of bondage: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States...”.¹⁰

This clause was not an accident. It was a deliberate political compromise that provided the full legal and constitutional authority for the re-enslavement of Black Americans. In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, Southern states, their economies shattered and their racial hierarchy threatened, moved with terrifying speed to exploit this loophole. They enacted a series of laws known as "Black Codes," which were explicitly designed to criminalize Black life.¹² Mundane activities like vagrancy, loitering, breaking curfew, or even unemployment became jailable offenses for Black people.¹¹ These codes created a vast and sudden supply of Black "criminals."

This new criminal class was then funneled into the convict leasing system, a practice even more brutal than chattel slavery. States leased out their incarcerated populations—overwhelmingly Black men—to private corporations to work in coal mines, build railroads, and toil on plantations.¹³ The state profited, the corporations profited, and the men, women, and children trapped in the system were worked to death under horrific conditions, with mortality rates in some camps reaching as high as 40 percent per year.¹⁰ By the 1870s, a staggering 95 percent of all individuals in criminal custody in the South were Black.¹⁷ This was not a justice system; it was an economic system built on the constitutional sanctioning of slavery through criminalization.

This system of control was enforced by a legal apparatus that evolved directly from the institutions of slavery. The slave patrols of the 18th and 19th centuries, private militias tasked with terrorizing and controlling the enslaved population, are the direct ancestors of modern American policing.¹⁸ Their mission was never public safety in the universal sense; it was the enforcement of a racial caste system. This legacy continues to inform the aggressive, racially biased policing that disproportionately targets Black and Brown communities today.

The Birth of the "Criminal Class": Legislating Marginalization

The targeting of Black Americans through the Black Codes was part of a broader, historical strategy of using the law to define and control a "criminal class." This strategy has always focused on the most marginalized members of society.

Vagrancy laws, for instance, have roots in feudal Europe, where they were used to control peasants and force them into labor pools after the collapse of the feudal system.¹⁹ In America, these laws were repurposed to serve a similar function. They criminalized poverty and homelessness, making it a crime to be unemployed or without a permanent residence.²⁰ For newly freed Black people, who owned no land and had few employment options outside of exploitative sharecropping, these laws were a trap, designed to force them back into a state of servitude.²²

This legal framework of marginalization was solidified under Jim Crow. From the late 19th century through the mid-20th century, Jim Crow laws created a formal system of racial apartheid, and the criminal justice system was its primary enforcer.²⁴ Under Jim Crow, Black individuals were systematically subjected to discriminatory policing, denied fair trials, and handed down harsher sentences for minor offenses.²⁶ This constant legal persecution reinforced the narrative that Blackness itself was inherently criminal, a dangerous stereotype that persists in the American consciousness and continues to justify the disproportionate policing and incarceration of Black communities.

The historical evidence reveals a chilling convergence. The system of punishment in America was not designed in a vacuum. It was the deliberate fusion of two pre-existing models of exploitation: the North’s for-profit industrial prison, which primarily used poor white and immigrant labor, and the South’s agricultural slave economy. The 13th Amendment’s exception clause provided the legal bridge, allowing the post-war South to adopt the North's framework of penal servitude and apply it to its own racial caste system. This synthesis created a uniquely American model of incarceration—one designed from its very inception as a flexible and enduring tool of racial and economic control. The design was not a regional anomaly but a national project, one that continues to adapt and evolve to this day.

The Profit Motive: How Mass Incarceration Became Big Business

If the historical foundations of the American prison system were built on social control, its modern expansion has been fueled by another, equally powerful force: profit. The era of mass incarceration did not just create a crisis of human rights; it created a multi-billion-dollar industry. This prison-industrial complex is a sprawling economic ecosystem where the caging of human beings has become a commodity, traded and exploited for financial gain. From the corporations that own and operate prisons to the vendors that supply everything from phone calls to food, a vast network of private interests has a direct financial stake in keeping our nation’s prisons full. This profit motive is not a side effect of the system; it is a central feature of its design, shaping policy and ensuring that the machine of incarceration continues to run.

The Prison-Industrial Complex: An Economic Ecosystem

The modern era of prison privatization began in the 1980s, perfectly timed to capitalize on the "Tough on Crime" policies that were causing prison populations to explode.²⁸ As public facilities became dangerously overcrowded, private corporations stepped in, promising cheaper and more efficient solutions. Companies like the Corrections Corporation of America (now CoreCivic) and GEO Group pioneered the for-profit prison model, securing government contracts to build and manage correctional facilities.²⁹ Today, these corporations are titans of the industry, managing facilities that hold tens of thousands of people in state and federal custody.³¹

This privatization boom also provided an economic lifeline to many struggling rural communities. As manufacturing and agricultural jobs disappeared, prisons became a source of stable employment, transforming entire towns into "prison towns." This created a deep economic dependency on the carceral state, making the prospect of decarceration a direct threat to the livelihoods of these communities and creating a powerful political obstacle to reform.

The result is what researchers have termed a "market in incarcerated people".³² While the direct cost of corrections is often cited at around $80 billion annually, the true economic burden of incarceration, when factoring in social costs like lost wages, family impacts, and health consequences, is estimated to exceed $1 trillion per year.³³ This staggering figure represents a massive transfer of public wealth into an industry built on human confinement, an industry that now includes over 4,100 corporations profiting from the system in some way.³⁴

Captive Labor, Corporate Profit

The most direct line from the post-slavery convict lease system to today is the continued practice of prison labor. The 13th Amendment’s loophole continues to provide the constitutional justification for forcing incarcerated people to work for pennies an hour, or in many states, for nothing at all.¹⁵ This system of captive labor generates billions of dollars in goods and services annually, benefiting both state-run prison industries and private corporations.

Incarcerated workers perform a vast range of jobs. The majority are employed in institutional maintenance—cooking, cleaning, and laundry—tasks that keep the prisons themselves running at a fraction of the cost they would otherwise incur.¹⁵ Others work for state-owned businesses, like UNICOR, the federal prison industries program, manufacturing everything from office furniture to military supplies. Still others are contracted out to private companies, working in call centers, meatpacking plants, or even fighting wildfires.¹⁵

This is a legally sanctioned system of exploitation. Incarcerated workers are explicitly excluded from the protections of the Fair Labor Standards Act and have no right to unionize or advocate for better wages or safer working conditions.³⁶ They are a perfectly controlled, captive workforce, allowing corporations to produce goods at artificially low costs, often undercutting competitors who pay fair wages.¹⁵ This is not rehabilitation; it is the 21st-century evolution of the prison plantation.

The Privatization of Humanity: Monetizing Basic Needs

The profit motive extends far beyond the prison walls and the factory floor. It has infiltrated the most basic aspects of human existence for the incarcerated, turning fundamental needs into revenue streams for a host of private vendors.

Prison healthcare is a prime example. In a bid to cut costs, many correctional systems have outsourced medical and mental health services to private companies. These for-profit providers have a documented history of providing substandard, negligent care in order to maximize their profit margins.³⁷ Stories of delayed diagnoses, denied treatments, and preventable deaths are tragically common in facilities managed by these companies.³⁹ In this model, the health of an incarcerated person is not a priority but a line item on a budget, to be managed as cheaply as possible.

Family connections have also been monetized. Predatory prison phone companies charge exorbitant rates for calls, forcing families—who are often already low-income—to choose between staying in touch with their loved ones and paying for basic necessities like rent and food.⁴¹ The industry generates over a billion dollars a year from these calls, a significant portion of which is often kicked back to the correctional facilities themselves. This is not just a fee for a service; it is a tax on love, a system that profits by exploiting the emotional bonds of the most vulnerable.

Even food and basic supplies are part of this profit-driven ecosystem. Contracts for food services are often awarded to private vendors who are notorious for providing low-quality, nutritionally deficient meals.⁴¹ Meanwhile, the prison commissary, the only place where incarcerated people can purchase items like soap, toothpaste, or extra food, functions as a monopoly with inflated prices, further draining the meager resources of the incarcerated and their families.

Policy for Sale: The Politics of Private Prisons

Perhaps the most insidious feature of the prison-industrial complex is its ability to shape public policy to serve its own financial interests. Private prison corporations are major political players, spending millions of dollars on lobbying and campaign contributions to influence state and federal lawmakers.⁴² Their own corporate filings admit that their business model is threatened by "the relaxation of enforcement efforts" or the "decriminalization of certain activities".³⁵ Their political strategy, therefore, is to advocate for the very "tough on crime" policies that guarantee a steady supply of human beings to fill their facilities.

This influence is most starkly visible in the contracts these companies sign with state and local governments. Many of these contracts contain "bed mandates" or occupancy guarantees, which require the state to maintain the prison's population at a certain level—typically 80 to 100 percent capacity.³⁵ If the number of incarcerated people drops below that threshold, the state must pay the company for the empty beds. This creates a perverse and direct financial incentive for the government to keep arresting and incarcerating people, regardless of crime rates or public safety needs. The state becomes a client, contractually obligated to deliver bodies to the corporation.

This reveals a system that is not merely responding to crime but is actively designed to create its own demand. The profit motive is not a passive beneficiary of mass incarceration; it is an active driver. Through a closed loop of political influence and contractual obligations, the prison-industrial complex funds the politicians who pass the laws that fill the beds that the industry is paid to keep full. This is not a system that has been corrupted by money. This is a system designed for it.

The Mechanics of the Machine: Policies That Built the Cages

The prison-industrial complex did not emerge from a vacuum. It was built, piece by piece, through a series of deliberate policy choices made over decades. These policies, often passed under the banner of public safety, created the legal and structural mechanisms that enabled the explosion of our nation's prison population. From the local courthouse to the halls of Congress, laws were crafted that systematically criminalized poverty, stripped judges of their discretion, and incentivized punishment over rehabilitation. These were not accidents or unintended consequences; they were the calculated mechanics of a machine designed to expand.

Justice for a Price: The Two-Tiered Bail System

The front door to mass incarceration is often the local jail, and the key that locks it is cash bail. Our system of pretrial justice is not based on an individual's risk to society but on their ability to pay. On any given day in America, nearly half a million people are held in jail not because they have been convicted of a crime, but because they are too poor to afford the bail set for them.⁴⁵ They are legally innocent, yet they are incarcerated.

This practice, which has its roots in English law, has been transformed into a powerful tool for criminalizing poverty.⁴⁶ The median bail for a felony charge is $10,000, a sum far beyond the reach of most low-income families.⁴⁸ This creates a stark, two-tiered system of justice: those with money can buy their freedom and fight their case from home, while those without are forced to remain behind bars. This pretrial detention can be devastating, leading to job loss, housing instability, and the separation of families. The pressure to get out of jail is so immense that many innocent people plead guilty to crimes they did not commit, simply to end their ordeal.

This system has also fueled a $2 billion for-profit bail bond industry that preys on desperate families, extracting non-refundable fees and trapping them in cycles of debt.⁴⁵ The cash bail system disproportionately harms communities of color, with studies showing that Black defendants are more likely to be assigned bail and at higher amounts than their white counterparts.⁴⁵ While reform movements in states like Illinois and New Jersey have begun to dismantle this unjust system, they have faced fierce political backlash, demonstrating how deeply entrenched this mechanism of control has become.⁴⁸

The "Tough on Crime" Illusion: A Bipartisan Project

Beginning in the 1970s and accelerating through the 1990s, a political consensus emerged around a "tough on crime" agenda. This was a bipartisan project, with politicians from both parties competing to prove who could be more punitive.⁵⁰ This era produced a wave of legislation that fundamentally reshaped the American sentencing landscape.

Mandatory minimum sentencing laws stripped judges of their traditional discretion, forcing them to impose fixed, often draconian sentences for specific offenses, particularly non-violent drug crimes.⁵¹ A low-level courier could receive the same sentence as a cartel leader, regardless of their actual culpability. These laws filled our prisons with first-time, non-violent offenders serving decades-long sentences.

"Three-strikes" laws took this punitive logic to its extreme, imposing life sentences for a third felony conviction. In states like California, this often meant a life sentence for a minor crime like shoplifting a pair of socks or, in one infamous case, stealing a slice of pizza.⁵³ The application of these laws was rife with racial bias, as the table below starkly illustrates.

Racial/Ethnic Group	% of CA Population	% of Felony Arrests	% of Prison Population	% of Third "Strike" Incarcerations
African American	7%	23%	31%	43%
White	53%	33%	30%	25%
Latino	32%	37%	34%	26%
Data compiled from reports by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice and the Justice Policy Institute.53

This data reveals a system that is not simply responding to crime but is actively targeting certain communities. The escalating disproportionality at each stage of the process—from population share to arrest, to general incarceration, and finally to a life-altering third strike—is not random. It is the visual evidence of a filtering mechanism designed to ensnare Black individuals with increasing intensity.

Finally, truth-in-sentencing laws, often incentivized by federal funding, required individuals to serve the vast majority of their sentences—typically 85 percent—before being eligible for release. This dramatically increased the actual time spent behind bars, contributing to the aging of the prison population and ensuring that facilities remained overcrowded.

The Lasting Shadow: The 1994 Crime Bill

The culmination of the "tough on crime" era was the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, signed into law by President Bill Clinton. It was the largest crime bill in American history, a sweeping piece of bipartisan legislation that codified and supercharged the punitive trends of the preceding decades.⁵⁵

The bill’s provisions were a blueprint for mass incarceration. It allocated $9.7 billion for the construction of new prisons, provided funding for 100,000 new police officers, expanded the federal death penalty to cover 60 new offenses, and established a federal "three-strikes" law.⁵⁷ As someone who has lived through the consequences of this era, I can tell you that for millions of us, this political consensus sealed our fate.

Crucially, the bill created powerful financial incentives for states to adopt its punitive model. Its truth-in-sentencing grants rewarded states for passing laws that scaled back parole and kept people in prison longer.⁵⁹ This federal stamp of approval and financial inducement fueled a prison construction boom across the country, locking states into a carceral model that they are still struggling to escape today.

These policies were designed to be politically "sticky." They created a ratchet effect where politicians could only ever be "tougher" on crime; any attempt to reverse course was politically framed as being "soft" or pro-criminal. The bill created an entire economic and political infrastructure—more prisons, more police, more prosecutors—that became deeply entrenched in state and local budgets. The system was designed not just to grow, but to resist shrinking. Reversing these policies now requires more than just changing a law; it requires dismantling the very machine that was so carefully, and deliberately, built.

The Human Cost: A Nation Behind Bars

The design of the American prison system—its historical roots in slavery, its profit-driven mechanics, and its punitive legal framework—is not an abstract concept. It is a reality lived every day by millions of people. The true measure of this system is not found in statutes or budgets, but in the shattered lives, broken families, and fractured communities it leaves in its wake. This level of widespread, predictable human devastation cannot be the result of a system that has simply malfunctioned. It is the calculated output of a machine operating with brutal efficiency.

The Ripple Effect: Collateral Consequences and Generational Cycles

The punishment of incarceration rarely ends when a sentence is served. It radiates outward, creating a ripple effect of harm that touches families and entire communities for generations. The impact on children with an incarcerated parent is particularly catastrophic. These children are more likely to suffer from psychological trauma, behavioral problems, and economic instability.⁶¹ They often experience ambiguous loss, grappling with the absence of a parent who is physically alive but entirely inaccessible.⁶³ This trauma, compounded by the financial and emotional strain on the remaining caregivers, creates a direct pipeline to the next generation of justice-involved individuals, perpetuating a heartbreaking intergenerational cycle of incarceration.⁶¹

Beyond the family, a criminal record triggers a vast and complex web of what are known as "collateral consequences." These are not part of a judge's sentence but are a labyrinth of nearly 44,000 legal and regulatory restrictions that follow a person for life.⁶⁴ These consequences are designed to permanently marginalize. They can bar individuals from employment in hundreds of professions, deny them access to public housing, make them ineligible for student loans, and strip them of public benefits.⁶⁷ This is not a series of disconnected rules; it is a parallel legal system, a modern-day caste system that ensures a criminal record functions as a lifelong subordinate status. It is designed to create the very conditions of poverty and desperation that lead to recidivism, ensuring a steady supply of people to feed the carceral machine.

The Second Sentence: Life as an "Ex-Felon"

As I detailed in the very first episode of my podcast, Justice Unshackled, I know the weight of this second sentence firsthand.¹ I remember the job interviews where my qualifications became irrelevant the moment I checked "the box." I remember the search for housing that felt like a series of closed doors. This experience is not unique to me; it is the reality for millions of returning citizens. The label of "ex-felon" becomes an indelible stain, a social stigma that shapes every interaction and closes off pathways to a stable life.⁶⁹

This stigma is not just social; it is political. Felony disenfranchisement laws, which have their roots in post-Civil War efforts to suppress the Black vote, continue to bar millions of American citizens from the ballot box.⁷¹ This is a deliberate stripping of political power from the very communities most harmed by the criminal justice system. By silencing the voices of those with criminal records—a population that is disproportionately Black and Brown—the system ensures that they cannot vote for the prosecutors, judges, and lawmakers whose policies directly control their lives.⁷³ It is a self-preserving design, one that systematically removes opposition and perpetuates its own power.

An American Obsession: Punishment vs. Rehabilitation

The American prison system's relentless focus on punishment stands in stark contrast to the approaches of many other developed nations. In Scandinavian countries like Norway and Sweden, as well as in Germany and the Netherlands, the guiding philosophy of corrections is rehabilitation and "normalization"—making life inside prison resemble life outside as much as possible to prepare individuals for reintegration.⁷⁴ Their prisons are often smaller, more humane, and offer robust educational and therapeutic programs. The results speak for themselves: these countries have dramatically lower incarceration rates and recidivism rates that are often less than half of those in the United States.⁷⁴

This comparison reveals that our system is a choice. America’s obsession with harsh, retributive punishment is not a universal human response to crime; it is a product of our unique cultural and historical context. It is influenced by a legacy of Puritanical beliefs in sin and retribution, a history of racial subjugation, and a political climate that has long found it profitable to stoke public fear.⁹ The suffering caused by our system is not inevitable. It is the outcome of a particular design, and other designs are possible. The success of rehabilitative models elsewhere proves that a justice system can prioritize healing and societal well-being over pure retribution, and in doing so, create a safer and more just society for everyone.

Conclusion: A System by Design—And the Choice to Redesign It

After tracing the American prison system from its historical roots to its modern mechanics, the conclusion becomes inescapable. This system is not broken. A broken system is one that fails to achieve its stated goals. If the goals were public safety, rehabilitation, and justice, then the system would indeed be a catastrophic failure. But the evidence we have examined points to a different set of objectives, ones the system achieves with chilling efficiency.

It is a highly effective system for the social control of marginalized populations, a design inherited directly from the ashes of slavery and refined through a century of Jim Crow. It is a ruthlessly efficient economic engine, generating billions in profits for private corporations by exploiting captive labor and monetizing human needs. And it is a remarkably resilient political machine, one that manufactures its own demand through lobbying and punitive policies, ensuring its own perpetuation. The racial disparities, the economic predation, the cycles of trauma—these are not accidental byproducts. They are the intended results of its design.

So, where does that leave us? If the system is not broken, can it be reformed? This is the central debate of our time. For decades, reformers have chipped away at the edges—banning the box, reforming bail, reducing mandatory minimums. These are vital, hard-won victories that have changed and saved lives. But do they change the fundamental architecture of the machine? Or do they simply make it run a little more smoothly, a little more humanely, while leaving its core purpose intact?

There is a growing movement, one with a long and powerful history, that argues reform is not enough.⁶⁶ This is the call for abolition. It is not a call for chaos or the immediate tearing down of every prison wall. It is a call to imagine and build a different world, one where we respond to harm not with cages, but with resources. It is a vision of a society that invests in communities, in mental healthcare, in education, and in housing, addressing the root causes of crime rather than simply punishing its symptoms. It is a call for decarceration, for shrinking the footprint of the carceral state until it becomes obsolete.

As someone who has been inside the machine, who has felt its gears grind against my own life, I believe our task is to be bold. We must reject the false choice between the system we have and a state of lawlessness. The choice is not between a "broken" system and a "fixed" one, but between accepting a system designed for oppression and having the courage to design a new one rooted in dignity, equity, and restoration.

This is the mission of Justice Unshackled. It is a call to move from understanding to action. The system was designed by people, and it can be redesigned by people. The work is long, and the path is not easy, but it is the only path that leads to true justice. It is time to stop tinkering with the machine of injustice. It is time to build something new.

Citations:

1. [Justice Unshackled] Episode 1: Introduction

2. [Justice Unshackled] Episode 2: “Of Young Chains and Forgotton Ones: Inside the Juvenile Justice System”

3. [JusticeUnshackled] Episode 3: “Imprisoned Identities- How LGBTQI+ Individuals Face Systemic Injustice in U.S. Prisons”

4. [JusticeUnshackled] Episode 5: “The Forgotten Gender The Fight for Women’s Rights in U.S Prisons”

5. [JusticeUnshackled] Episode 4: “Cycles of Injustice- Examining Race, Poverty, and Incarceration in the United States”

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