"As a society we're always so quick and able to spend money on lawyers for someone for incarceration, but we don't make the corresponding commitment to the preventative components of it"
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The line lands because it exposes an accounting trick we treat as moral common sense: we call punishment “public safety,” then act surprised when the bill keeps growing. Matt Gonzalez frames incarceration not as an inevitability but as a choice underwritten by a legal-industrial workflow. “So quick and able” is doing heavy lifting here. It implies reflex, even comfort - a system that can mobilize resources instantly when the goal is prosecution, defense, and confinement. The phrase “lawyers for someone for incarceration” pointedly reduces a complex apparatus to its most legible transaction: we are willing to pay professionals to process a person into a cage.
The sting is in “corresponding commitment.” Gonzalez isn’t romanticizing prevention; he’s making a parity argument. If we can afford the downstream costs (court time, public defenders, prosecutors, jail staffing, surveillance), then scarcity is a political story we tell ourselves when the upstream costs come up (housing, mental health care, addiction treatment, youth programs, job pipelines). The subtext is that prevention fails not because it doesn’t work, but because it doesn’t satisfy our cultural appetite for visible consequence and bureaucratic certainty.
As a politician shaped by late-20th-century “tough on crime” orthodoxy and its aftershocks, Gonzalez is also speaking to a reform era that keeps getting stuck at decarceration rhetoric. He’s challenging the public to notice the asymmetry: we treat risk as something to be managed through removal, not through investment. That’s less a budget preference than a worldview.
The sting is in “corresponding commitment.” Gonzalez isn’t romanticizing prevention; he’s making a parity argument. If we can afford the downstream costs (court time, public defenders, prosecutors, jail staffing, surveillance), then scarcity is a political story we tell ourselves when the upstream costs come up (housing, mental health care, addiction treatment, youth programs, job pipelines). The subtext is that prevention fails not because it doesn’t work, but because it doesn’t satisfy our cultural appetite for visible consequence and bureaucratic certainty.
As a politician shaped by late-20th-century “tough on crime” orthodoxy and its aftershocks, Gonzalez is also speaking to a reform era that keeps getting stuck at decarceration rhetoric. He’s challenging the public to notice the asymmetry: we treat risk as something to be managed through removal, not through investment. That’s less a budget preference than a worldview.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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