I didn’t want to be a lawyer. The ones I knew struck me as arrogant in a way I couldn’t see myself becoming, and the idea of introducing myself as “an attorney” made me cringe. I went to law school out of a love for America and its divinely inspired principles, a foundation for human freedom and flourishing meant to be a light to the entire world. Criminal law was probably my last priority. But that all changed my first semester.

The American Constitution Society, the liberal law student organization, would bring Innocence Project exonerees on campus to speak. I was in the more conservative Federalist Society, but I enjoyed going to those events. What struck me was not the bitterness of those wrongfully convicted, though they had earned the right to it; it was the precision of their grievance. They did not say the system was beyond repair. They wanted specific fixes, not a clean slate.

I grew up believing the United States is the greatest country on earth. I still believe that. But believing it doesn’t mean ignoring the faults; it means fixing them. Prosecutors can fix those faults from the inside, so that’s what I decided to do.

My first case as a prosecution intern at the Washington County Attorney’s Office made my direction clear. The case involved the sexual abuse of a young teenager by a family member. Sitting with that file, working through what the case required, I understood where I could make a real difference, and the high-volume drug and property cases weren’t it. In cases where a vulnerable victim was profoundly harmed, putting that person away was a genuine act of protection, and that’s what I committed myself to.

I spent years putting in the hours, won most of my cases and loved it. Locking up dangerous offenders needed no justification. But I couldn’t ignore what I watched alongside it. The same faces kept coming back through, incarceration clearly accomplishing nothing for them. What exactly were we trying to accomplish, and were we doing it?

According to state budget data, Utah taxpayers spend at least half a billion dollars a year on incarceration, reentry and supervision, not counting clinical treatment billed separately to Medicaid. While the official recidivism rate sits under 18%, that number only counts people returned to prison for a new conviction. More than 8 in 10 parole revocations are for technical violations, including missed check-ins and failed drug tests, not new criminal conduct. Over 1,600 people went back to prison last year for exactly that. That 18% counts none of them. The metrics make Utah’s corrections system look better on paper than it is in practice.

The problem isn’t a shortage of treatment programs. Courts routinely mandate 30-, 60-, and 90-day clinical programs, and the same people cycle through them repeatedly. The evidence points persistently in one direction. Lasting change comes from environments that demand something of people, not merely contain or process them.

ConQuest and SOLID inside the prison system, and The Other Side and John Volken Academies in the Salt Lake area, are therapeutic communities built on peer accountability, structured work and genuine personal consequences. They produce outcomes that traditional incarceration and programming have not, but reach only a fraction of the people who could benefit.

Utah has the foundation to reach far more. Thousands are serving sentences with little asked of them, their time and potential going entirely to waste, benefiting neither society nor themselves.

Like all citizens, Utahns serving prison time deserve real mechanisms for growth and contribution. Right now, most of them don’t have any.

Utah can be a proof of concept. A state that reforms its corrections system to demand genuine rehabilitation and real contribution from people, rather than mere incarceration and release, would show the country that America’s incarceration rate is a policy choice, not an inevitability.

The Declaration of Independence was America’s fresh start, a statement of purpose: Government exists to secure the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That we remain the world’s longest-running constitutional democracy is a testament to the foresight of our founders and to every generation since that chose to refine what they built rather than discard it. A shining light on the hill is not a nation without problems; it’s one with the honesty to name them and the will to fix them.

That’s the country and the system I still believe in.

Josh Nemeth is the Criminal Justice Policy Analyst for Libertas Institute.

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