Newsflash: There Is Nothing Conservative About a $49,290 Prison Bed

If limited government, fiscal discipline, work, personal responsibility and strong families are Republican values, America’s addiction to incarceration deserves a much harder audit.

Republicans are supposed to distrust big government.

They are supposed to care about taxpayer money, productive work, intact families, individual responsibility, and government programs that can prove they actually work.

So explain mass incarceration to me. And because they can’t, I call “bullshit.”

This is not an argument that no one who causes serious harm needs intervention. Some people need real, structural help, mental health treatment, addiction treatment, support most of them never had access to in the first place. The system as currently built does not provide that. It tends to make the underlying problem significantly worse and wrongly names the result as justice.

I am talking about the reflex. The one that treats a prison sentence as proof that a prosecutor was tough enough, a judge was serious enough, or a politician cared enough about crime, regardless of what another year behind bars actually accomplishes.

Because once you strip away the slogans and run incarceration through the same cost benefit analysis conservatives demand of literally every other government program, something strange happens.

A lot of “tough on crime” policy stops looking conservative and starts looking exactly like the kind of government conservatives claim to hate.

So here is the question I kept coming back to while I put this together: what in the actual fuck are taxpayers actually purchasing here?

Limited Government, Except When It Isn’t

Conservatives ordinarily demand extraordinary justification before government gets to exercise coercive power over a citizen. Criminal punishment is arguably the most coercive domestic power government has. Taking years of someone’s liberty should require more scrutiny than most government action, not less.

Right on Crime, the conservative criminal justice reform initiative whose founding signatories include figures like Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist, built its entire platform on this idea. Its Statement of Principles opens with constitutionally limited government and individual liberty, and it says plainly that criminal law should not be used simply to expand government.

I want to sit with that for a second, because it runs exactly backward from how most of American criminal justice actually operates. We built the largest incarcerated population on earth and called the reflex behind it conservative. Somewhere along the way, “tough on crime” became a permission slip for one of the largest expansions of state control over individual human beings that this country runs.

Fiscal Responsibility, Except in Corrections

Fiscal responsibility is supposed to mean scrutinizing every dollar. Except, apparently, in corrections.

Michigan’s own Department of Corrections reported an average FY2025 appropriated expenditure of $49,290 per incarcerated person, per year. Say that number out loud. Forty nine thousand, two hundred ninety dollars. One year.

That makes the question wonderfully concrete. An additional year in prison is not an abstraction. Somebody, a prosecutor, a judge, a legislature, affirmatively chose to spend roughly another $49,000 instead of allowing that person, where it was safely possible, to work, pay taxes, pay restitution, and support the people who depend on them.

I do not know a single fiscal conservative who would sign off on a $49,000 line item anywhere else in a state budget without demanding to see the results it produced. Corrections gets a pass that nothing else in the budget gets.

Pro-Work, Except When Government Benches the Workforce

This is where it connects directly to what I have spent four years writing about in Judge Michael Schipper’s courtroom. A prison sentence does not just cost the state money. It removes a worker from the workforce. It disrupts a career, eliminates tax revenue, can destroy a small business, and leaves an employer scrambling to replace someone. Then government turns around and spends money housing the person it just prohibited from supporting themselves.

Even Right on Crime has moved toward this framing, describing effective reentry as a way to strengthen the workforce and convert public costs into taxpayers. If that is a legitimate conservative goal on the back end, at release, it should be a legitimate conservative question on the front end, before sentencing.

Pro-Family, Except When Punishment Destabilizes the Whole House

There is a real, legitimate punishment imposed on the person who is sentenced. I am not arguing otherwise. But incarceration also reaches spouses, children, and caregivers who were never charged with anything.

Conservative reform advocates explicitly name preservation of family and community as part of the conservative case for reform. That is where the poverty creation argument gets bigger than one household. Remove one income. Create a childcare problem. Create a housing problem. Create a transportation problem. Then act surprised when that family needs public assistance.

Mass Incarceration Is Not Pro-Life. It Is Carceral Eugenics.

Officials and voters who call themselves “pro-life” do not get to define life as valuable only until birth and disposable once government places a case number beside it. A politics that claims to protect families while supporting mass incarceration removes parents from children, separates partners, destroys household income, destabilizes housing, damages mental health, restricts intimate relationships, and determines which families have the resources and freedom to survive. That is not a politics organized around protecting life. It is a politics organized around deciding whose lives, families, and futures are allowed to flourish.

Eugenics has never been limited to one procedure or one historical program. Its governing logic is the use of state power to sort people into the worthy and unworthy, protect the reproduction and stability of favored groups, and obstruct the survival, family formation, and future of disfavored groups. Mass incarceration performs that sorting through cages, criminal records, surveillance, poverty, and forced separation. It removes people from their communities during years when they might work, parent, form relationships, care for relatives, and build generational stability. It then returns many of them with fewer rights, fewer resources, and state-imposed barriers to housing and employment.

This judgment does not depend on proving that every prosecutor, judge, commissioner, or voter consciously embraces historical eugenic ideology. Intent matters, but effects matter too. The editorial claim is that officials who know mass incarceration separates families, concentrates poverty, limits family formation, and damages the next generation—and who nevertheless expand and defend it—are advancing eugenic outcomes whether or not they use the word. A person cannot wash those outcomes clean by attaching a “pro-life” label to the same political program.

A genuinely pro-life government would value people after birth, after accusation, after conviction, during incarceration, and after release. It would protect bodily autonomy, due process, family connection, housing, health, education, work, treatment, and the material conditions children need to grow. It would measure public safety by harm prevented and lives stabilized, not by the number of human beings processed into cages. It would fight to preserve families instead of financing their destruction.

Personal Responsibility, Except When Prison Prevents It

This might be my favorite one, because it flips the personal responsibility argument on its head.

If someone owes restitution, child support, or a debt to a victim, ask yourself honestly what arrangement maximizes accountability, where public safety allows it: someone working and actually paying those obligations, or taxpayers paying to warehouse the debtor so they cannot pay anyone anything.

Right on Crime has made essentially this exact conservative critique about incarceration for fines and fees. A system that destabilizes families and spends taxpayer money without making anyone measurably safer is not conservative. It is just expensive.

Government Accountability, Except Nobody Asks What the Marginal Year Bought

Here is the question I think should sit at the center of every sentencing decision in this state, and it almost never gets asked: what did the additional year actually buy us?

I am not asking whether incarceration ever works, because I do not think warehousing someone who needed treatment, not a cage, was ever the honest answer to begin with. I am asking the much better question, the one conservatives themselves should be asking. What did year four accomplish that years one through three did not? What did sixty months buy that twenty four months would not have?

That is the exact kind of marginal return analysis conservatives demand before funding literally any other government program. Corrections does not get to skip the audit just because it comes with razor wire around it.

Public Safety Has to Be Measured in Outcomes, Not Sentence Length

Michigan actually makes this argument easy, because the state’s own numbers do the work for me. MDOC reports the statewide recidivism rate has fallen to 22.7 percent, the second lowest in state history, driven by evidence based programming and successful reentry. Graduates of the state’s Vocational Village trades program return to prison at just 12 percent.

A genuinely conservative analysis does not ask who imposed the longest sentence. It asks which intervention produced fewer future victims per taxpayer dollar. Michigan’s own data says the answer is not always more time.

Zoom out and the number gets enormous. The Bureau of Justice Statistics counted 1,852,900 people incarcerated in state or federal prisons or local jails at year end 2023. You do not even need to get ideological with a number that size. Just ask what would happen if every one of those confinement decisions had to survive the kind of return on investment analysis Republicans demand of education spending, welfare spending, or public transit.

And here is the part I actually find delicious. I am not inventing a liberal version of conservatism to make this argument. Right on Crime’s current platform already lists constitutionally limited government, transparency, individual liberty, personal responsibility, free enterprise, family and community, measurable outcomes, and taxpayer value as the conservative criminal justice principles. It recognizes prison as necessary for genuinely dangerous offenders while rejecting the idea that incarceration is the right tool for every offense. In 2025 the organization went further, arguing conservatives should judge criminal justice by public safety outcomes and fiscal discipline rather than by how long a sentence runs.

Which Brings Me Back to One Michigan Courtroom

Which is why the question I raised last week about Barry County Michigan Judge Michael Lee Schipper and Prosecutor Julie Nakfoor-Pratt is actually a lot bigger than one court that wants to be bigger than it really is.

When a judge exceeds a sentencing guideline. When a prosecutor stomps their foot and demands another year. When a legislature raises a mandatory minimum. Someone should have to explain what taxpayers are buying. Not rhetorically.

Show me the return. Show me the additional victim who will be protected. Show me the reduction in recidivism. Show me why incarceration produces a better outcome than supervision, treatment, restitution, or employment. Show me why the additional destruction of someone’s earning capacity, and their family’s stability, was worth the additional government expenditure.

Show me what you got out of all of this that made it worth it for you to devastate families other than another reason to pat yourself on the back and pretend that you did your job.

Conservatives demand that kind of accounting everywhere else in the budget. Criminal justice should not get an exemption just because the program comes with razor wire.

Prison Is Sometimes Necessary. Mass Incarceration Is a Choice.

Prison is sometimes necessary.

Mass incarceration is a policy choice.

There is nothing inherently conservative about maximizing the number of people the state controls, maximizing the number of years it controls them, maximizing the corrections bureaucracy required to do it, and sending taxpayers the bill.

A genuinely conservative criminal justice system would not spend its most expensive and coercive sanction on people who needed treatment instead of a cage. It would demand measurable results. It would value work, restitution, and rehabilitation. It would preserve families where public safety allows it. And it would stop pretending that the amount of punishment imposed is the same thing as the amount of safety produced.

If your definition of small government ends at the courthouse door, you do not believe in small government.

You just have a favorite kind of big government.