If Leverage Changes Systems, Then Who Actually Holds It?

We’ve established that outrage doesn’t move institutions. Evidence alone doesn’t either. Systems change when incentives shift, and incentives shift when leverage is applied in a way that cannot be ignored.

So the real question is simple: who actually has leverage over a system like Arizona Department of Corrections?

It isn’t the incarcerated. They exist at the bottom of the hierarchy. Their complaints can be categorized, delayed, minimized, or reframed as disciplinary issues. Their leverage is structurally limited by design.

It isn’t individual officers either. Most operate within policy constraints they didn’t create. They can influence daily culture, but not funding structures or long-term incentive models.

Real leverage exists in three places: funding authorities, legislative oversight, and public tolerance.

Funding authorities control the flow of resources. If money is tied strictly to containment and operational stability, then containment will be perfected. If funding becomes conditional on long-term outcomes — reduced returns, improved stability after release, measurable rehabilitation — behavior at the institutional level would shift quickly. Institutions respond to financial architecture.

Legislative oversight is the second pressure point. Oversight with teeth changes behavior. Oversight without enforcement becomes ceremony. When audits, reporting requirements, and outcome evaluations carry real consequences, institutional priorities adjust. Without consequence, oversight is simply paperwork.

But the most underestimated leverage point is public tolerance. Institutions operate within the boundaries the public allows. As long as voters equate toughness with safety and accept recidivism as inevitable, systemic failure remains politically survivable. When public expectation changes — when effectiveness matters more than optics — political incentives begin to realign.

The uncomfortable reality is that leverage rarely originates from inside the system itself. It emerges when external actors decide the cost of maintaining the current model outweighs the disruption of redesigning it.

And that’s where the tension lives.

Because redesign is uncomfortable. It threatens authority structures. It redistributes influence. It challenges decades of narrative around punishment and justice. It forces admission that severity alone has not delivered the outcomes promised.

Leverage requires sustained pressure. Not emotional spikes. Not viral moments. Sustained, measurable pressure tied to outcomes.

The system is stable not because it’s flawless, but because the forces capable of destabilizing it haven’t aligned consistently enough to outweigh the comfort of the status quo.

Tomorrow, we’re going to talk about what sustained pressure actually looks like — and why consistency, not intensity, is what eventually shifts institutional behavior.

This isn’t about anger.
It’s about influence.

And influence only matters when it’s applied strategically.