Bureaucracy. What comes to mind when you see these eleven letters? It’s strange how certain words are claimed by political movements. Imagine Biden claiming the investigation into his son, Hunter, and the infamous laptop a “witch-hunt,” or Hillary Clinton referring to her internet server scandal back in 2016 as a “hoax.” The thought of a Democrat using this MAGA vernacular is almost as jarring as the thought of Trump calling Mar-a-Lago his “safe space” or signing his executive orders “he/him.”

I know all about bureaucracies. I am currently living in one: the Federal Bureau of Prisons. (And if right now you’re imagining me riding around in golf carts while getting stock tips from former investment bankers, think again. I live in a crumbling dungeon that was built during the Great Depression. I can stick my arms out and touch both walls of my tiny cell. The water is murky, there’s black mold in the showers, and the air tastes like asbestos. But that’s another essay . . .)

After the inauguration, when Elon Musk and his merry band of tech nerds rode deep into the heart of government bureaucracy, the media outlets on the left portrayed them as a bunch of 20-year-old, nose-ringed, purple-haired college kids who, best case scenario, were threats to national security. Worst case scenario: they were hellbent on destroying longstanding programs like Medicare and Social Security. Of course, conservative talk radio and Fox News hosts labeled this as typical lib hysteria, overlooked the occasional error made by the DOGE team—like adding an extra zero to the amount saved—and cheered on the chainsaw-wielding Musk as he slashed and burned his way through USAID, the Center for Disease Control, and various other American institutions.

As my fellow prisoners and I await the great and terrible artificial eye of DOGE to train its laser-focused pupil on the 8-billion-dollar budget of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, there are two conflicting camps of expectation.

Ironically, it’s the Fox News MAGA majority who are abuzz with boundless optimism. They believe that Elon will drastically reduce the budget by shutting down prisons and allowing anyone with less than three years remaining on their sentence to finish up on home detention. And since Trump signed significant criminal justice reform into law in 2018 with the First Step Act and then pardoned 1600 Jan-Sixers on his first day back in office, there is plenty of cause for hope.

Across the unit, at the CNN television, my liberal brothers have a much gloomier outlook. They fear that less money will result in less guards which will result in less programs and inevitably more lockdowns. They take Trump’s tough-on-crime campaign promises at face value and worry that, even as American citizens, they too could end up in an El Salvadorian supermax due to federal prison overcrowding.

Where do I stand? I’ll give you one guess and two hints. (It’s neither left nor right.) If Mr. Musk begins hacking away at the FBOP, prisons will absolutely be shut down. Will this translate into people going home, or will they simply be transferred to other facilities? Hard to say. But it’s important to point out that prison profiteers like the GEO Group were key donors to the Trump war chest in 2016, 2020, and 2024. And I’m guessing that they would love nothing more than a fat federal contract to take over the Bureau of Prisons. But what would it say about this country if the same corporations who were lobbying Congress for tougher laws and longer sentences—not in the interest of justice, but in the interest of their own bottom lines—were the same companies who were receiving multi-billion-dollar contracts to warehouse the nation’s prisoners?

In many ways, it feels like America is not entering a “golden age” as the president proclaimed at his inauguration, but something more akin to the Dark Ages. Especially when it comes to the hidden world of corrections.

—April 14, 2025