In 2032, standing president and well-respected businessman Lindsey Graham passed an executive order that outright banned the private prison industry. the American people, frustrated by the idea that they were paying taxes that ultimately never reached the prisoners themselves, were exhausted and had vied for this decision for the better part of a year.

for a time, this decision was well-received. the government took control of the prison system, publicized the prisons, and swore to use tax dollars correctly. waspy neoliberals and blocky cons pundits finally agreed on something, the country was united over the idea that public services were finally going to be public again.

unsurprisingly, things did not turn out this way.

about two weeks after the order was passed, the government was crushed by the sheer weight of the amount of money they’d be required to spend to keep things operating, so they raised taxes. a flat increase in all brackets, no working man woman or child was exempt from this increase. at the beginning, most citizens accepted this. the consensus was that publicizing the prison system was a heruclean task, and that doing so wouldn’t just happen over night. this sentiment lasted for exactly four days, at which point a national public broadcast let the country know that everyone’s taxes would again be raised.

when the third broadcast aired and taxes were raised yet again, the country exploded in civil unrest. the people were angry, they didn’t want their taxes to pay for the country home of some Montana warden, but they also didn’t want to be solely responsible for the living conditions of prisoners who would likely just reoffend anyways.

for 7 days, every major US city struggled with performances, protests, riots, looting, and more. at this point, every working American citizen was required to pay upwards of 70% of their yearly income to the government. the people were poor and they were frustrated, the sentiment rang through each crowd that worst case scenario was an arrest, which wasn’t anything more than transitioning from provider to provided-for.

for a time, the country looked lost. an issue that once brought americans together was now responsible for more polarization than the 2016 election cycle. the country was divided, panic permeated the public consciousness, and not one person in this fine nation felt any semblance of safety.

thankfully, this changed on the 8th day.

it’s unknown where the idea originated, maybe from closed doors in back rooms in the whitehouse, quiet, fluorescent saferooms deep below the pentagon, hidden ranches nestled deep within acres of midwestern plains, regardless of its origins, President Graham, on that 8th day of unrest, provided the country with a clear path forward.

executions. public executions in droves.

now, if this had been presented before the exponential bump in tax responsibilities, the country might not have responded so well. but, considering the global unrest creeping in from each side, bordering countries that collapsed on themselves a decade ago, and the high price of keeping criminals alive, coalesced to create a feeling of unadulterated rage in the citizens required to pay for the mistakes of the incarcerated. this sentiment took shape in a single, short sentence.

“let them die”

and so it was, the government released a three-strike program that would make Ronald Reagan shit his pants. the way it worked was surprisingly simple: anyone who was currently serving a life sentence was to be sentenced to death. anyone with more than three nonviolent convictions was sentenced to death. anyone with more than one violent conviction was sentenced to death.

by and large, the goal was to eradicate 85% of the prison population with one order, allowing the country to pay considerably less in taxes while allowing those who truly wanted to use prison as a form of rehabilitation to do so.

the logistics of the executions took some time. at first, the idea was to use an electric chair or the injections they’d been using for decades; but unfortunately, the company that provided lethal injections was a subsidiary of the primary private prison business that had only weeks before been shut down.

this led to a bid for the injection materials, but the winning company struggled with the formula and injected 16,000 prisoners with an inordinately viscous substance that caused each death to be punctuated with the firmest erection any of the public had ever seen.

fairly quickly, the decision to return to form via hanging was made. the rope companies have existed long enough to allow the quality of the ropes to speak for themselves, and, considering that the executions had been publicized for a reason, the people seemed to enjoy the public spectacle of hangings more than they enjoyed other forms of demise.

every major american city, and most smaller ones too, was outfitted with public gallows only a short walk from the city’s prison. each saturday, men from the prison take the slow walk from captivity to meet their fate. each saturday, the people, who are still paying ~70% in taxes I might add, stand before the gallows and scoff at the fools stupid enough to find themselves in such a pitiful condition.

the original order was effective, quickly eliminating a vast portion of American criminals, but the success of the executions and the entertainment value that the public derived from the events created an environment where our great nation saw long-term value and took it.

it’s been ten years, weekly executions continue, the crime rate is the lowest it’s been in four decades, and there’s less capital in our economy than ever before.