Understanding the institutional forces behind containment can help you avoid reactive mistakes that only make things worse.
If you have ever been caught in the court system and felt like pushing back only made everything worse, you were not imagining it. If you have noticed that certain prosecutors and judges seem to follow the same playbook, overcharging people who question them, escalating against families who organize, punishing defendants who file motions, what you are seeing is absolutely real.
It is called containment, and believe it or not, it is not personal. It is structural; baked into the legal system but never really talked about.
Understanding why the system behaves this way will not make the experience less painful, but it can help you avoid the most common mistake people make: fighting back in ways that give the system exactly what it needs to justify escalating against you.
So today I am unpacking:
- Why prosecutors and judges in small and mid-sized counties often operate like closed ecosystems
- What triggers the containment reflex and why it feels so personal
- How courthouse growth creates perverse incentives that reward aggressive prosecution
- What the research says about prosecutorial culture, discretion, and retaliation
- How to channel your energy in ways that do not backfire
The Pattern You Are Noticing Is Real
In Michigan counties like Allegan and Barry, people have observed prosecutors and eventually judges who worked together follow remarkably similar patterns. High conviction rates. Courthouse expansion. New judgeships filled from within. Escalation against defendants who push back.
This is not coincidence. It is learned institutional behavior passed down in offices where careers depend on conformity and growth is mistaken for legitimacy.
Legal scholar Angela J. Davis describes prosecutorial offices as often functioning with minimal oversight and maximum discretion, creating environments where institutional norms, not legal ethics, guide behavior. In smaller jurisdictions, this effect intensifies because the same people work together for decades, socialize together, and promote from within.
What Containment Actually Means
Containment is the system’s immune response to perceived threats. It activates when:
- Defendants assert their rights aggressively
- Defense attorneys file motions challenging procedure
- Families organize or document patterns
- Complaints are filed against judges or prosecutors
- Media attention emerges
- Anyone connects dots across cases
The system reads these actions not as calls for correction but as attacks on legitimacy. Research on organizational behavior in criminal justice shows that institutions under perceived threat tend to close ranks and respond with what scholars call defensive processing, escalating rather than examining.
Containment responses include:
- Overcharging to regain negotiating leverage
- Procedural delays framed as normal process
- Bail escalation justified as public safety
- Reputation attacks through informal channels (and sometimes formal ones)
- Stacking charges when defendants reject plea offers
- Retaliation disguised as enforcement
Critically, prosecutors often do not consider this as retaliation. They experience it as “restoring order.” Legal researcher Stephanos Bibas notes that prosecutors develop cognitive biases that make them see discretionary escalation as necessary and appropriate, even when outside observers would call it vindictive.
Why Courthouse Growth Drives the Machine
Here is the incentive structure that matters:
- More prosecutions lead to more convictions.
- More convictions create more workload.
- More workload justifies more judges.
- More judges bring more staff, more budget, and more internal promotions.
This creates a self-reinforcing cycle. Aggressive prosecution is not just about individual cases. It is about institutional expansion.
When a courthouse grows, everyone inside gains:
- More career pathways
- More insulation from scrutiny
- More normalization of extreme outcomes
- More political relevance and budget protection
Research on prosecutorial performance metrics shows that offices are rarely if ever evaluated on whether they achieved fair and just outcomes. They are evaluated on conviction rates, case volume, and resource acquisition. In this environment, containment becomes a survival strategy.
Challenges threaten the ecosystem that feeds everyone’s career, and they can’t have people challenging their status quo.
Why It Feels Personal When It Is Structural
For people on the receiving end, containment feels intensely personal because it is experienced through individual harm. Your bond gets revoked. Your charges get stacked. Your child’s case gets escalated.
Inside the courthouse, they view it very differently. To them, the same actions are viewed through a different lens and instead framed as:
- Maintaining order
- Deterring manipulation
- Upholding the court’s authority
- Protecting public safety
This gap between lived reality and institutional narrative is what makes the system psychologically brutal. Scholar Jonathan Simon describes this as governing through crime, using the apparatus of criminal law not primarily to achieve justice but to manage perceived threats to court authority.
The system is not lying exactly, but it definitely is gaslighting you. Through cognitive dissonance, they are far removed from the harm they are doing; they cause pain and then justify their actions.
And that is what makes it dangerous.
Why the Playbook Spreads
Prosecutors who work together do not just share office space. They share:
- Training on managing difficult defendants
- Informal mentorship on when to escalate
- Social ties with judges who validate their approach
- Career incentives tied to the same growth model
When they move to other counties or get promoted, the playbook moves with them. Legal scholar Ronald Wright documents how prosecutorial culture functions like an invisible curriculum. New prosecutors learn not from ethics manuals but from watching what gets rewarded.
In places like Allegan and Barry Counties, small to mid-sized rural counties by Michigan standards, that shared context (smaller populations, limited oversight, and interconnected legal-political networks) can create similar institutional dynamics even if the populations are not identical. As a result, the same operating logic takes root.
The Deeper Cause: Fear of Lost Control
At its core, containment is driven by institutional fear:
- Fear of exposure
- Fear of losing discretionary power
- Fear of setting precedent
- Fear the public will realize the system is discretionary, not inevitable
Once a system realizes it can be questioned, it must either evolve or suppress. Evolution requires accountability, transparency, and admitting error. But suppression? That only requires more of what the system already knows how to do: charge, detain, escalate, contain.
Most court systems choose suppression because it is easier and because the people inside genuinely believe they are protecting something important, even if they cause irreparable harm and trauma while doing so.
How People Get Hurt by Fighting Back the Wrong Way
This is the part that matters most for anyone caught in the system: the system is built to absorb and weaponize your resistance.
When you:
- Yell at a judge in court
- File rambling pro se motions full of accusations
- Threaten prosecutors or court staff
- Post unhinged rants or ineffectual conspiracy theories on social media
- Refuse to comply with procedural requirements
- Act in ways that confirm the system’s narrative about you
You give the system exactly what it needs to justify escalating. You become the difficult defendant. You confirm their story. You make their containment feel righteous.
Research on courtroom behavior shows that judges and prosecutors interpret resistance through a respect-for-authority framework. Visible defiance often triggers harsher outcomes regardless of the legal merits.
And if your Judge is like Michael Schipper, he’ll bend the legislative guidelines and intentionally manipulate offense variables to make the punishment fit the narrative.
None of this means the system is right. It just means the system is predictable.
How to Protect Yourself: Channeling Energy Without Self-Destruction
If you or someone you care about is caught in a court system that feels retaliatory, you have to be smart about challenging the status quo, because how you approach it can generate unwanted and painful consequences if you go about it the wrong way. Here is how to avoid making it worse.
1. Understand You Are Not Fighting a Specific Person, You Are Navigating a System
Judges and prosecutors are not comic book villains. They are people operating inside a structure that rewards certain behaviors. Treating any of what they do as personal is a bad move; they would do what they did to you, to literally anyone getting in their way and likely already have for years. This isn’t about you; it’s about their need to maintain their status quo. Treating their reactions as personal will only cloud your judgment.
2. Document Everything Calmly and Precisely
Dates. Times. Quotes. Procedural irregularities. FACTs; not angry narratives. Evidence. Let the pattern speak for itself.
3. Do Not Perform Resistance in Court
Judges have enormous discretion. Visible defiance rarely helps and often triggers escalation. Save your energy for motions, appeals, and external advocacy.
4. Get a Lawyer Who Understands The Local Ecosystem
Not all defense attorneys really understand containment dynamics. You need someone who knows how the local courthouse actually operates.
5. Channel Advocacy Outside the Courtroom
Organize families. Document patterns across cases. File public records requests. Contact journalists. Support transparency tools. Work on policy change. Do the work that actually threatens the system rather than confirming the narrative they want so desperately to create about you. The system discrediting you means no one will take you seriously; they’ll call you crazy, disruptive, a bad person, dangerous, because they don’t want people to see that you’re actually right about them. Don’t let them cast you into the role of agitator.
6. Protect Your Mental Health
The system is designed to exhaust you and deplete resources. Fighting while enraged or destabilized leads to decisions you will regret. Get support. Pace yourself. Stay grounded.
7. Recognize When Retreat is Strategic
Sometimes the best move is minimizing contact with the system, accepting a survivable resolution even if unjust, and living to fight another day. This is not surrender. It is survival.
Why Pattern Recognition Matters
Most people only see one case: their own. When you start seeing patterns across cases, across counties, across years, you are seeing something the system needs to keep invisible. And it does a pretty good job through limiting news coverage, and of course, bullying people into silence.
Pattern recognition threatens containment-based systems because it exposes the myth that each harm is isolated, justified, or accidental, rather than what they do to anyone who stands up against them.
That is why systems react so strongly to people who connect dots calmly and persistently. It is not paranoia. It is systems defending themselves.
The most powerful thing you can do is make the pattern visible without destroying yourself in the process.
Moving Forward
The criminal legal system in many small and mid-sized counties operates more like a self-protective political organism than a neutral arbiter of justice. Prosecutors and judges are responding to institutional incentives that reward growth, conformity, and control.
Understanding this will not make the experience less painful. But it can help you:
- Avoid reactive mistakes that make things worse
- Channel your energy strategically
- Protect others from the same harm
- Stay out of additional trouble caused by fighting blindly
The system is powerful, but it is not invincible. It is most vulnerable to calm, persistent, documented exposure of patterns it cannot explain away. Facts and data; that’s how you win.
Your anger is valid. Your harm is real. The question is how you channel it without giving the system exactly what it needs to justify crushing you.
That is the work. And it matters.
Sources
- Davis, A. J. (2007). Arbitrary Justice: The Power of the American Prosecutor. Oxford University Press.
- Stoughton, S., Noble, J., & Alpert, G. (2020). Evaluating Police Uses of Force. NYU Press. [discusses organizational defensive processing in criminal justice institutions]
- Bibas, S. (2004). Plea Bargaining Outside the Shadow of Trial. Harvard Law Review, 117(8), 2463-2547.
- Wright, R. F., & Miller, M. L. (2010). The Screening/Bargaining Tradeoff. Stanford Law Review, 63(1), 85-134.
- Simon, J. (2007). Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy. Oxford University Press.
- Wright, R. F. (2005). Trial Distortion and the End of Innocence in Federal Criminal Justice. University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 154(1), 79-156.
- Rachlinski, J. J., Johnson, S. L., Wistrich, A. J., & Guthrie, C. (2009). Does Unconscious Racial Bias Affect Trial Judges? Notre Dame Law Review, 84(3), 1195-1246.
