In March 2017, a musician named Phil Parhamovich was pulled over on Interstate 80 near Cheyenne, Wyoming, for not wearing a seatbelt. The trooper questioned him about his trip. Officers searched his minivan. They found no drugs, no contraband. They found $91,800 in a speaker cabinet, his life savings. A state agent pressured Parhamovich to sign a waiver releasing the money. He signed. He was never charged with a crime. The state kept his life savings until the Institute for Justice sued and a judge ordered it returned in December 2017.
Phil Parhamovich is one name in a dataset of hundreds of thousands. His case appears in this essay not because it is unique but because it is ordinary. The machine does not know his name. The machine does not need to.
The question is not whether the state cares about you. The question is why anyone still expects it to, why the indifference is treated as a malfunction rather than as the machine’s operating specification.
The state is not a person. The state is a system made of people, and the system does what systems do: it optimizes for its own continuation. When the system’s continuation and your welfare diverge, the system does not pause to weigh the trade-off. It cannot pause. Pausing is a property of minds, and the system does not have one. The people inside it have minds. The system does not. The people go home at night. The system keeps running.
This is not a metaphor. The evidence is in the record, and the record is long.
The seizure
Since 2000, federal and state law enforcement in the United States have forfeited at least $68.8 billion in cash, cars, homes, and other property from Americans. The figure is an undercount. Not every state reported data. The federal government alone forfeits between $2 billion and $3 billion every year.
Civil asset forfeiture allows police to seize property on the suspicion that it is connected to criminal activity. The owner does not need to be charged with a crime. The owner does not need to be convicted of a crime. In 71 percent of federal Department of Justice forfeitures, the property was forfeited administratively, meaning no hearing, no judge, no day in court.
Here is what happens to a person whose property is seized. You receive a notice. The notice gives you a deadline. You call a lawyer. The lawyer costs $3,300. The property is worth $1,678. Half of all currency forfeitures across 24 states are worth less than $1,678. You do not call the lawyer. The deadline passes. The property is forfeited administratively. No hearing occurs. No judge is present. The Institute for Justice, which compiled the largest dataset of forfeiture records ever assembled, documented this arithmetic across the country.
The arithmetic is the mechanism. If the state takes $1,678 from you, recovering it costs $3,300. The state does not need to prove you did anything wrong. The state needs only to take less than it would cost you to get it back. The seizure is not a failure of due process. The seizure is due process, calibrated so that contesting it is irrational. (The math is the policy. Read it twice.)
The proceeds go to the agencies that perform the seizures. The police who take the property keep the property. The prosecutors who process the forfeitures benefit from the forfeitures. The Institute for Justice found that in 2018, agencies in 13 states with expenditure data spent almost nothing on crime victims and an average of 9 percent on community programs. The rest went to law enforcement budgets.
Phil Parhamovich got his money back because a public-interest law firm took his case for free. Most people do not get a public-interest law firm. Most people get the notice, read the arithmetic, and let the property go.
The state called this a crime-fighting tool. The state’s own data shows it does not fight crime. It funds the state.
The taxing
The Ferguson, Missouri, municipal court was not a court. It was a revenue center. The Department of Justice investigated it after Michael Brown was shot in 2014 and found that the city’s law enforcement practices were “shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs.” Between 2010 and 2014, Ferguson issued 90,000 citations and summonses. The population of Ferguson was 21,000. In 2013 alone, the municipal court issued more than 9,000 arrest warrants, most for missed court appearances or unpaid fines stemming from parking infractions, traffic tickets, and housing code violations.
In 2012, fines and fees funded 13 percent of Ferguson’s general budget. For fiscal year 2015, the city budgeted 23 percent of its revenue from fines and fees. City officials evaluated police and court staff on the amount of revenue they produced. The city finance director wrote to the police chief in March 2010: “Unless ticket writing ramps up significantly before the end of the year, it will be hard to significantly raise collections next year.”
The court issued warrants for failure to pay. The warrants produced arrests. The arrests produced jail time. The jail time was the penalty for poverty. The DOJ found that the court’s practices “impose unnecessary harm, overwhelmingly on African-American individuals, and run counter to public safety.”
Ferguson is not unique. It is documented. The mechanism is general: the court becomes a revenue center, the warrant becomes a collections tool, the jail cell becomes the penalty for not having money.
The state called this municipal enforcement. The state’s own data shows it was taxation by citation, enforced by police, adjudicated by a court that served the budget.
The caging
At midyear 2024, local jails in the United States held 657,500 people. Sixty-nine percent of them, 450,600, were unconvicted. They were awaiting court action. They were legally presumed innocent. They were in jail because they could not pay bail.
The Prison Policy Initiative documented the arithmetic. Five out of six people detained before trial are there because they could not afford bail. The typical bail amount for a felony defendant is $10,000. In Philadelphia, 25 percent of people whose bail was set at $500 or less remained in jail through the disposition of their case, because they could not pay the $50 deposit required for release.
The state sets a price on liberty. The state sets the price above what the accused can pay. The accused is caged. The cage produces the pressure. The pressure produces the plea. The plea produces the conviction. The conviction produces the sentence. The sentence produces the labor. The labor feeds the prison. The price on liberty was the first link in the chain, and the chain ends in the field at Angola.
The state calls this pretrial detention. The state’s own data shows it is the caging of the poor for the crime of being poor, calibrated to produce the convictions that fill the prisons that extract the labor.
The arming
In August 2017, President Donald Trump lifted restrictions that the Obama administration had placed on the Pentagon’s 1033 program, which transfers surplus military equipment to local law enforcement agencies at no cost. Since then, agencies have received nearly $454 million in military gear, roughly the same amount they received during the years the restrictions were in place.
The program has distributed more than 600 mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles (MRAPs, designed to withstand roadside bombs on the front lines of war) to local police departments in nearly every state. It has distributed 422 helicopters, 50 airplanes, 479 bomb-disposal robots, $124 million in night-vision equipment including sniper scopes, 3,972 combat knives, and more than $3.6 million in camouflage and “deception equipment.”
A 2017 study published in Research & Politics examined the relationship between 1033 transfers and police violence. The researchers found a positive and statistically significant relationship between military equipment transfers and fatalities from officer-involved shootings. The relationship held across every model they tested. More military equipment. More dead civilians. The correlation is documented. The direction is consistent.
The state called this equipping the police. The state’s own data shows it is armoring the police against the population they police.
One person every 6.44 hours
In 2024, police killed 1,365 people in the United States. It was the deadliest year on record. There were 10 days in the entire year when law enforcement did not kill someone. The average was 3.73 people per day. One person every 6.44 hours.
In 2025, the number declined to 1,314, the first year-over-year decrease in six years. There were 6 days when police did not kill anyone. Campaign Zero, which tracks the data through its Mapping Police Violence project, noted the decline. They also noted the scale: more than 1,300 people killed by law enforcement in a single year is not a decline. It is a rate.
Black people are 2.8 times more likely to be killed by police than white people.
On February 2, 2022, a Minneapolis Police Department SWAT team executed a no-knock search warrant on an apartment. Amir Locke, 22, was asleep on a couch. Officers entered. Within six seconds, Sergeant Carlson kicked the couch. Another officer yelled, “Get on the ground.” Locke, draped in a blanket, fell to the floor. As he began to stand, he reached for a handgun near the couch. Officer Mark Hanneman fired. Amir Locke died on the floor of his cousin’s apartment, in the dark, six seconds after the door opened. He was not the suspect the warrant named.
The state calls these “officer-involved shootings.” The phrase is clean. The phrase is clinical. The phrase describes a lethal act in the register of a procurement form. An officer did not “become involved.” An officer killed a person. The passive construction erases the actor. The harm is described. The agent disappears. The sentence reads as though the shooting happened on its own.
When the families of the dead seek accountability, they encounter qualified immunity. Qualified immunity is a judicially created doctrine, not a statute, not passed by Congress, constructed by the Supreme Court, that shields government officials from civil liability unless they violated a “clearly established” statutory or constitutional right. The standard, set in Harlow v. Fitzgerald (1982), is not whether the officer violated your rights. The standard is whether a court has previously ruled that the specific conduct, in the specific circumstances, was unconstitutional. If no prior case matches, and the doctrine’s design makes matching cases rare because each case that fails to match establishes no precedent for the next one, the officer is immune. The right exists on paper. The remedy does not exist in practice.
Amir Locke’s family sued. The officer claimed qualified immunity. The case is still in the courts.
The state calls this “balancing accountability with the need to shield officials from harassment.” The consequence is that the state kills its citizens and the citizens cannot sue the people who did it. The balance is not between two interests. The balance is a one-way ratchet: the shield grows, the accountability does not.
Slavery was nationalized
The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery. It did not abolish all slavery. The text reads: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
The exception clause is not a loophole. It is the architecture. Slavery was not abolished. Slavery was nationalized. The state reserved to itself the right to enslave anyone it convicted of a crime.
The ACLU’s 2022 report Captive Labor, produced with the University of Chicago Law School’s Global Human Rights Clinic, found that approximately 800,000 incarcerated people work in U.S. state and federal prisons. More than 76 percent are required to work or face additional punishment: solitary confinement, denial of sentence-reduction opportunities, loss of family visitation, inability to pay for basic necessities like soap. In seven states, incarcerated workers are paid nothing at all. Elsewhere, wages average between $0.13 and $0.52 per hour for work that maintains the prison (cooking, cleaning, laundry, repairs) and between $0.30 and $1.30 per hour for prison industries work. Incarcerated firefighters in California, who battle the same wildfires as civilian crews, are paid $1 per hour.
The Columbia Law Review, in a 2023 analysis, estimated that at least 600,000 people were held in conditions meeting the international definition of slavery in the United States in 2020. The figure is a minimum, based on the number of people forced to work under threat of punishment. More capacious definitions produce higher numbers.
Incarcerated workers produce at least $11 billion in goods and services annually. They cook. They clean. They maintain the buildings that confine them. They fight fires. Some pick cotton. At Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary built on a former plantation, incarcerated workers still harvest cotton by hand under armed guard. The labor that runs the prison is extracted from the people the prison holds. The prison is a factory that consumes its own raw material.
The state calls this rehabilitation. The state’s own data shows it is extraction. The word “rehabilitation” is a softening word. Translated back to structure: the state forces people to labor for pennies or nothing, under threat of punishment, and calls the arrangement rehabilitative. The rehabilitation framing serves the institution, not the incarcerated. It makes the extraction legible as public service.
The inventory
Two lists. No commentary between them.
What the state has acquired:
- 600 mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles
- 422 helicopters
- 50 airplanes
- 479 bomb-disposal robots
- $124 million in night-vision equipment, including sniper scopes
- 3,972 combat knives
- $3.6 million in camouflage and deception equipment
- $68.8 billion in forfeited cash and property since 2000
- A database of Americans’ communications searchable by name, without a warrant
What has been taken from citizens:
- $91,800 from Phil Parhamovich, a musician, at a traffic stop
- $11,000 from Charles Clarke, a college student, at an airport
- $446,000 from the Hirsch brothers, candy distributors, from their business bank account
- 1,365 lives in 2024
- 1,314 lives in 2025
- 800,000 people’s labor at $0.13 to $0.52 per hour
- 4 million people’s right to vote
- The right to sue the officer who killed your family member
The gap between the two lists is the argument.
Why the warrant requirement was stripped
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows U.S. intelligence agencies to intercept the electronic communications of foreign nationals located outside the United States. When those foreign targets communicate with Americans, the Americans’ calls, texts, and emails are swept into the database. The FBI can then search that database using Americans’ names, phone numbers, and email addresses, without a warrant.
The program has been used to spy on racial justice protesters, political donors, journalists, and a sitting member of Congress. In March 2023, Representative Darin LaHood, a Republican from Illinois and a member of the House Intelligence Committee, stated at a public hearing that he believed he was the unnamed member of Congress whose name the FBI had queried multiple times in the Section 702 database. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence had declassified a report documenting the query. The FBI called it “noncompliant” and “overly broad.” A FISA court opinion later revealed that FBI employees had also searched the database using the last names of a U.S. senator and a state senator.
In April 2026, the House of Representatives reauthorized Section 702 for three years. The bill passed 235-191. It did not include a warrant requirement for searches of Americans’ communications. Lawmakers from both parties had sought such a requirement for nearly two decades. The requirement was stripped. The FBI’s authority to search Americans’ communications without judicial approval remains intact.
The state calls this foreign surveillance. The architecture surveils Americans. The distinction between “targeting foreigners” and “collecting Americans’ communications” is the distinction between a door and the room behind it. The door is foreign. The room is yours. The FBI walks through the door without asking, and the room is already recorded.
This is the surveillance dividend: the value the state extracts from the machinery of observation. The state does not need to target you to collect you. It needs only to target someone you know, someone you emailed, someone whose number is in your phone. The collection is incidental. The access is systematic. The privacy dimension is not personal. Reading the privacy policy will not help you. The privacy dimension is structural: who owns the machinery of observation, and what they do with what it sees. The answer is the state, and what it does is store everything and search at will.
You are in the database. You have been in the database since before you read this sentence. The query that returns your name has not been run yet. It does not need to be run yet.
The silencing
The state cages the body, extracts the labor, and then removes the ballot. Four million Americans cannot vote because of a felony conviction. The Sentencing Project documented the figure in 2024. That is 1.7 percent of the voting-age population. One in 59 adult citizens. One in 22 Black adults.
Seventy-five percent of disenfranchised people are not in prison. They are living in their communities, on probation or parole, or having completed their sentences. Two million people are disenfranchised after completing their sentences entirely. The state has released them. The state has not restored their vote.
Laws in 48 states ban people with felony convictions from voting. Only Maine, Vermont, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico do not restrict the voting rights of anyone with a felony conviction, including those in prison.
The state calls this a consequence of conviction. The consequence is that the citizen is consumed and then denied the instrument that could dismantle the mechanism that consumed them. The machine does not need to prevent reform by force. It prevents reform by removing the reformers from the electorate.
The machine
Still. Each mechanism is documented. Each is operated by human beings. No single human designed the whole. No single human could dismantle it.
The forfeiture attorney processes the paperwork. The police officer drives the MRAP to a drug raid. The prison guard supervises the laundry. The FBI analyst runs a query on an American’s name. The federal judge applies the qualified immunity standard and dismisses the case. The municipal court clerk processes the warrants. The bail bondsman collects the fee. The state legislature sets the prison wage at zero. The secretary of state purges the voter rolls. Each one is doing a job. Each one goes home at night, eats dinner, sleeps, returns in the morning, and does the job again.
This is what it means to say the state is a system made of humans but a system. The humans are not cruel. Most of them, most of the time, are not. The system is not cruel. Cruelty requires intent, and intent requires a mind. The system has a procedure. The procedure produces the outcome. The outcome is extraction at every stage: the property seized, the fine assessed, the bail set, the body surveilled, the body killed, the body imprisoned, the body forced to labor, the ballot removed, the body shielded from accountability by the doctrine that protects the people who did the killing.
The components interlock. Forfeiture funds the police. Militarization equips the police. The equipment escalates the encounters. The encounters produce the killings. Qualified immunity shields the officers. The prison receives the convicted, the bail system produced the plea that produced the convicted, the prison extracts the labor, the surveillance watches the ones who are not yet inside, the disenfranchisement removes the ones who got out from the electorate. The cycle does not need a conductor. Each component feeds the next because each component’s incentive structure points toward the next. The forfeiture attorney has no reason to question the militarization. The guard has no reason to question the forfeiture. The analyst has no reason to question the prison. The judge has no reason to question any of it. Each one’s job is narrow. The system’s effect is total.
The counterargument
The strongest objection to this analysis is that the state is not a monolith. These are separate policies, enacted at different times, by different legislatures and courts, each addressing a different problem. Civil forfeiture was expanded as a drug-war tool. The 1033 program was created to manage surplus military inventory. Qualified immunity was constructed to protect officials from frivolous litigation. Prison labor was preserved as a constitutional exception. Section 702 was designed for foreign intelligence. Cash bail was a colonial inheritance. Fines and fees were a local revenue choice. Felony disenfranchisement dates to the post-Reconstruction era. Each has its own history, its own rationale, its own constituency. Calling them a single machine imposes a pattern on what is really a pile of independent decisions.
This objection has merit. The policies were not designed in concert. No blueprint exists. No committee sat down and said: we will build a machine that seizes property, taxes the poor by citation, cages them before trial, arms the police, kills civilians, imprisons them, extracts their labor, watches the survivors, removes their vote, and shields the operators from accountability.
But the objection confuses design with outcome. The policies are separate. The outcome is not. The outcome is a system that extracts from its citizens at every stage of contact: takes their property before conviction, taxes them by citation, cages them for inability to pay bail, surveils their communications without a warrant, kills them at a rate of more than three per day, imprisons them at the highest per capita rate in the world, extracts their labor for pennies or nothing, removes their right to vote, and shields the people who do the extracting from legal consequence. Whether each policy was designed to produce this outcome is a question about intent. The outcome is what the system produces. The question is not what the designers intended. The question is what the machine does.
The counterargument also assumes that because humans operate the system, humans can reform it. This is true in principle and structurally difficult in practice. The system’s design channels each human’s discretion toward the system’s continuation. The forfeiture attorney who declines to process a seizure does not end forfeiture. The next attorney processes it. The judge who refuses qualified immunity in one case does not end the doctrine. The appellate court applies it. The prison warden who raises wages does not end forced labor. The state legislature sets the wage at zero. The legislator who introduces a bail-reform bill does not end cash bail. The committee chair tables the bill. Each human’s reform is local. The system’s response is structural. The reform is absorbed. The machine adjusts. The machine does not stop. And the four million people who might have voted to stop it are not allowed to vote.
What the record shows
Look. The state does not care about you because the state is not the kind of thing that can care. This is not cynicism. It is structural description. A system made of humans does not inherit the humans’ capacity for care. It inherits their labor, their compliance, their inertia, and their incentive to keep their jobs. The care, if it exists, exists in the humans. The system does not transmit it. The system transmits the procedure.
The record shows what happens when a system is structured to extract and shielded from accountability. It shows $68.8 billion seized without convictions. It shows a city that budgeted 23 percent of its revenue from fines and fees and issued 9,000 warrants in a single year to collect it. It shows 450,600 people caged before trial because they could not pay bail. It shows 600 mine-resistant vehicles parked at local police departments. It shows 1,365 people killed in a single year, with 10 days when no one was killed. It shows Amir Locke, dead on a couch, six seconds after the door opened. It shows 800,000 people forced to labor for wages that have not changed since the early 2000s, while the goods and services they produce are worth $11 billion. It shows an FBI that searched a congressman’s name in its database and a Congress that reauthorized the authority without requiring a warrant. It shows 4 million people who cannot vote because of a conviction, 2 million of whom have completed their sentences. It shows a judicial doctrine that makes the right to sue the people who killed your family member theoretical.
The state stated it was protecting public safety. The consequence was this.
The humans inside the system are not the problem in the way the phrase “bad apples” suggests. The humans are the components. The problem is the machine. The machine does not need bad humans. The machine needs humans who do their jobs. It has them. The machine runs. The machine eats its own. It does not notice, because noticing is not a system property, and the humans have been relieved of the obligation to notice.
The last line of the record is not a resolution. The record is ongoing. The machine is running now. Someone is being seized. Someone is being taxed by citation. Someone is being caged for inability to pay bail. Someone is being watched. Someone is being killed. Someone is being forced to labor for nothing. Someone is being denied the vote. Phil Parhamovich got his money back. Most people do not. The machine does not know their names.
Threads teaser: The arithmetic is the mechanism. If the state takes $1,678 from you, recovering it costs $3,300. The state does not need to prove you did anything wrong. The state needs only to take less than it would cost you to get it back.
