America — where a person can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and rise above their class.
Or not.
Poverty is an injustice that permeates this country. It is built into our system and continues because of our actions today. Racism, sexism, unjust incarceration — all of it can be traced back to America’s obsession with making money at the expense of the poor.
Look at our prison system. Incarceration rates have increased fivefold since the 1970s. More than half our prisoners suffer from untreated mental illness, according to the American Psychological Association.
Most states continue to allow solitary confinement, despite numerous facilities in Britain proving that fostering social interaction and rehabilitation is far more beneficial. Yet we do not follow suit here.
Why? Money. Private prisons generate a large amount of revenue, an amount that is often calculated based on the number of incarcerated individuals. This makes it useful to imprison members of vulnerable classes, whose crimes in some cases are little more than merely existing.
In 2012, companies representing about half of U.S. private prisons generated more than $2.53 billion, according to the 2023 book “Poverty, by America” by Matthew Desmond.
That’s just half of the private prisons. That is absurd. That is lucrative. And that was more than a decade ago. Consider the amount generated now, in 2024.
So we pay to maintain our prisons — to keep the finances of those in the middle and upper classes alive, regardless of the cost.
We ignore the clear racial disparity in incarceration rates. We ignore that 8% of the world’s prisoners are Black men, a statistic emphasized by Ta-Nehisi Coates in his 2015 book “Between the World and Me.” We ignore it because we think, that’s not our fault, that’s on them.
Better yet, that’s because of the system.
Yes, the all-encompassing system, a scapegoat for all our wrongs. The system.
Except we contribute to that system every day. It’s true that our systems are messed up. They were built on injustice, on the backs of the enslaved and the migrants and the poor.
But even now, this injustice is allowed to continue through our action and our inaction.
It is unjust to maintain the livelihood of the middle class — and through that, broaden the success of the elite and the corporations — at the expense of the poor. We live in a country of majoritarianism, complacent under rich businesses.
The suffering of others does not seem to be our problem. And because it can directly benefit us, there is a clear incentive not to address it.
We live in an economic system in which poverty is used as a way to weed out anyone who can be considered “less than.” These people, we argue, are lazy. They don’t have what it takes. They just need to put in more work and pull themselves up by the bootstraps. That’s the American dream, after all.
But, honestly, that’s just what we say to make ourselves feel better. Because at the root of our system, we are predatory capitalists. And for that level of capitalism to thrive, there has to be someone “less than” to exploit.
We protect the interests of the corporations and the wealthy by feeding those at the bottom of the rung the lie of the American dream.
But the real American dream is this: We manufactured poverty from the start for the benefit of wealthy people and businesses.
We continue to manufacture it today. We need to stop blaming the system and start dismantling it instead, in order to create an America that truly is the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Lexi Groff is in the 11th grade at Solanco High School.
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