Success Quote by Barbara Deming

Deming’s sentence has the quiet menace of a polite argument that’s about to flip the table. She grants the official story of punishment - “of course” jails “try” to deter - then immediately starts sanding down its authority. That opening concession isn’t softness; it’s strategy. By accepting the premise, she denies the system its favorite defense: that critics “don’t understand” deterrence. She understands it perfectly, and that’s why the next move lands.

The phrasing does two things at once. “Punishing the troublesome” exposes a moral category disguised as a technical one. “Troublesome” isn’t “dangerous,” or “violent,” or even “criminal”; it’s whoever causes friction for the prevailing order. Deming’s subtext is that incarceration often operates less like public safety and more like social management: remove the irritant, reassure the rest.

Then she offers the measured olive branch - “No doubt, in certain instances” - a clause that reads like intellectual honesty but functions as rhetorical insulation. She’s not making an absolute claim; she’s calling the system’s bluff on its own metrics. If deterrence is the justification, it should be broadly, reliably true, not occasionally true in the way superstition “works” when you remember the hits and forget the misses.

Context matters here: Deming wrote from a nonviolent, civil-rights-aligned skepticism of coercion. Her target isn’t only prisons; it’s the deeper cultural faith that pain teaches. The real sting is “fails conspicuously”: not a small inefficiency, but a public, repeated embarrassment that persists because the point may never have been deterrence at all.