When Consequences Don’t Change Behavior

Anyone who has spent time in the criminal justice system knows the term frequent flier.

The same names.

The same faces.

The same revolving door.

That repetition breeds frustration. It leads to harsher condemnation and shorter patience. Over time, it creates a quiet assumption that nothing works, so punishment just needs to last longer.

But very rarely do I see anyone pause long enough to ask a different question:

What would it actually take to make a difference?

We’ve all heard the saying that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result. If that’s true, then a lot of how we handle criminal behavior deserves a hard look.

Thirty days.

Sixty days.

A year.

Years of probation.

Violation after violation.

State prison.

Parole.

And nothing changes.

Sure enough, the same person is back in court on another charge. Everyone involved is frustrated. Patience wears thin. And the loop starts again — plea, punishment, incarceration, probation, violation, new charge.

It begins to feel like a strange NASCAR race.

And just like NASCAR, everyone keeps turning left.

I sometimes wonder what would happen if someone turned right.

In NASCAR, there’s a wall.

Here, there isn’t.

The purpose of consequences has to be change. That raises an uncomfortable question: what if what we call punishment isn’t actually punishment at all — at least not to the person receiving it?

If consequences are not experienced as consequences, behavior does not change.

Somewhere along the way, we reduced a complex, individual problem into a one-size-fits-all system. We try to fit everyone into the same box, regardless of who they are, what drives their behavior, or what they actually value. In practice, this often becomes an adult version of a timeout — removed briefly, returned unchanged.

Very few people stop to figure out what would actually cause the behavior to stop.

Most of us value our freedom because our lives resemble freedom. Losing it would disrupt our families, our jobs, our routines, and our sense of identity. Because of that, we assume the loss of freedom carries the same weight for everyone.

It doesn’t.

Until we acknowledge that consequences affect people differently — and that change requires understanding what actually matters to the person in front of us — we will keep doing the same thing, over and over, while hoping for a different result.

This is not an easy problem with an easy solution. But placing people on timeout is clearly not working. At a certain point, it becomes obvious: consequences don’t change behavior if the person experiencing them doesn’t experience them as meaningful.

And the cost of pretending it does is not abstract.

California currently budgets approximately $127,800 per year to incarcerate a single individual. As of December 31, 2025, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation reported 90,592 individuals in custody. That figure does not include the broader supervised population, which brings the total population under CDCR oversight to over 130,000 people.

Even using the most conservative measure — incarcerated individuals only — that places annual incarceration costs at well over $11 billion.

That level of spending is not sustainable.

If the outcome is the same behavior repeating itself, year after year, then we are not paying for safety or change. We are paying for a system that is stuck turning left — because it has forgotten to ask whether there is another direction worth trying.

At the professional level, this isn’t a debate about being soft or tough. It’s a question of effectiveness. A system that applies the same consequence repeatedly, at great cost, without changing behavior is not exercising accountability — it’s defaulting to routine. Public safety improves when consequences are meaningful to the individual, not merely familiar to the system. Until we are willing to apply judgment, evaluate outcomes honestly, and adjust when something clearly isn’t working, the cycle will continue — along with the cost that comes with it.