What Being Escorted Out of a Prison by Armed Guards Taught Me About Our Failing Systems

Two decades ago, I learned firsthand what it feels like to be a pawn in a broken system.

In the spring of 2006, I was a junior in college, completing the required internship for my Human Development and Family Studies major. Social welfare had been a preoccupation of mine since childhood. For school history fair, all 4 years were some iteration of a presentation on the American penal system. One year, our four-person skit on Jane Addams and Hull House made it all the way to nationals in Washington, D.C. My investment in this work was not only academic; it was personal.

It was no surprise that my junior year internship landed me at a minimum-security, all-male prison about twenty minutes from campus. For four months, unpaid, I worked with the men on familial and relational skills. We drew pictures and wrote letters to send to their children. We talked about the kind of open communication that could sustain relationships across distance and circumstance. We worked on how to show up for their families in whatever way they still could and explored what re-integration into society and their familial dynamics would look like, upon release. Each man came with his own capacity and his own willingness, and I never took that for granted. But I was proud of what we were building together. The conversations were honest. The trust was real.

Then, on the very last day of my internship - with only a few hours left before I would have completed my four months - two armed correctional officers walked into the room where I was facilitating programming and told me I needed to come with them. That I was being escorted off the premises.

The reason they gave me: my appearance was too distracting for the inmates.

I had looked exactly the same for four months.

Nonetheless, I gathered my belongings and was escorted across the open prison quad in front of every inmate who happened to be outside shooting hoops or meandering back from lunch, through the barbed wire fence that contained the grounds, and deposited me at my car in the vacant parking lot.

As a 20-year-old, I didn’t yet fully understand what had just happened. I understood the shame in the public performance of being walked out as though I had done something wrong, when my only offense had been genuinely trying to help people society had already forgotten.

I learned afterward what had been happening behind the scenes: a married couple who were both correctional officers at the facility; the wife had been caught in a sexual relationship with one of the inmates. The warden had a scandal on his hands in the months leading up to this additional scandal. Internal trust was fractured, and the institution needed a visible act of control. I was the most available, least powerful person on the grounds that day.

I became the pawn in a fractured system.

What Systems Do When They’re Failing

What I experienced that day wasn’t an anomaly. It was the system working exactly as broken systems tend to work.

When institutions function well, they protect the people inside them. When they fail, they do the opposite: they protect the institution itself, at the expense of everyone else.

In prisons, this dynamic is especially entrenched. The United States incarcerates more people per capita than any other nation on Earth, and the infrastructure built around mass incarceration; the staffing models, the union protections for correctional officers, the political incentives for “tough on crime” posturing, creates a culture where accountability flows down and protection flows up. Misconduct by staff is quietly absorbed. Blame is displaced onto the most vulnerable available target.

The CO’s wife sleeping with an inmate wasn’t just a personal failing; it was a serious breach of power, ethics, and the law. The appropriate institutional response would have been transparent: investigate, discipline, report, address the culture that allowed it. Instead, the warden manufactured a distraction: me.

And in manufacturing it, he demonstrated exactly what the institution valued: not the welfare of the incarcerated men I had spent four months working with, not the integrity of the programming, not any commitment to accountability, but the false appearance of order.

This is what failing systems do. They perform control rather than exercise it. They displace consequences rather than absorb them. They sacrifice the expendable; interns, inmates, low-level staff, anyone without institutional power or protection, to preserve the image and status of those at the top.

What Keeps Broken Systems Broken

Systems don’t stay broken by accident. They stay broken because brokenness is profitable. And because the people with the power to fix failing systems often have financial or political incentives not to.

The American prison system is a stark illustration of this. Private prison corporations generate revenue on a per-bed, per-day basis — meaning higher incarceration rates directly increase profit. Correctional officers’ unions lobby against sentencing reform because fewer inmates means fewer jobs. Politicians campaign on incarceration as a proxy for safety, regardless of what the evidence says about recidivism or rehabilitation. The economic scaffolding around mass incarceration is enormous, and it is largely invisible to the public.

What gets lost inside that scaffolding are the men I sat with in that room. The men drawing pictures for children they couldn’t tuck in at night, writing letters they weren’t sure would be read, practicing the language of relationships they were terrified they’d already broken beyond repair. The programming I was facilitating was not expensive or complicated. It was human connection. It was, by most measures, exactly what reduces recidivism and supports successful re-entry. And it was the first thing made disposable when the institution needed to protect itself.

That is the pattern. Rehabilitation gets cut when budgets tighten. Mental health services get eliminated when costs are scrutinized. Re-entry support gets defunded when it isn’t politically visible. The things that actually work — slow, unglamorous work of helping people rebuild, are perpetually underfunded, because they don’t serve the metrics that matter to the people running the systems. Profit. Optics. The appearance of control.

Why This Matters

I am not the most important person in this story. I went back to campus, finished my degree, and moved on.

While I did move on, I carried with me a clear understanding I couldn’t put down: you can show up with full integrity, genuine care, and produce concrete results and be made completely disposable by a system that was never actually built around the outcomes you’re trying to create.

This is what I see now when I watch systems fail in real time - healthcare, child welfare, education, or housing. It is rarely a failure of the people doing the ground-level work. It is almost always a failure of the structure around them: the incentives that reward the wrong things, the cultures that protect the powerful, the institutions that have quietly stopped serving the people they supposedly exist to serve.

The warden of that prison didn’t escort me out because I was a threat. He escorted me out because he could. And he wasn’t even who escorted me out - he sent someone beneath him to do the dirty work. Because I had no power, no protection, and no recourse - using me as a pawn cost him nothing.

This was the first, but definitely not the last time I felt the impact of being grossly mistreated by the very systems that pretend to offer protection. That experience gave me a framework I’ve never been able to unsee: when a system fails the people it claims to serve, it is almost never an accident. It is a choice made quietly and repeatedly, by people who will never be walked across the quad by armed guards.