In America today, several systems are notoriously predatory because they extract resources–money, labor, health, or dignity–from people without providing safety, care, or fairness in return. These systems often target the most vulnerable while shielding those with wealth and power. Here are some of the most predatory:
1. Healthcare System
- Why it’s predatory: It profits off pain and illness. People are routinely denied care based on their insurance or ability to pay, while pharmaceutical companies, insurers, and hospital executives rake in billions.
- How it preys: Surprise billing, medical debt, unnecessary procedures for profit, denial of necessary procedures due to cost or coverage, and a failure to treat root causes (especially for trauma, chronic pain, and complex conditions).
- Who it targets: The poor, disabled, uninsured, chronically ill, people of color, and women, especially in reproductive and gynecological contexts.
2. Criminal Legal System / Prison-Industrial Complex
- Why it’s predatory: It’s built not on justice or safety but on control, punishment, and profit.
- How it preys: Over-policing, harsh sentencing, privatized prisons, exploitative prison labor, cash bail systems, and plea deals that coerce innocent people into confessions.
- Who it targets: Black and brown communities, poor people, neurodivergent individuals, protestors, and trauma survivors.
3. For-Profit Education and Student Loan Industry
- Why it’s predatory: It promises opportunity while delivering debt, especially through for-profit colleges that often deliver low-quality education.
- How it preys: Ballooning tuition, exploitative interest rates, lifelong debt burdens, and degrees that don’t lead to economic stability.
- Who it targets: Young people, especially from working-class and immigrant families seeking a better future.
4. Child Welfare and Family Regulation System
- Why it’s predatory: It often removes children not to protect them but to manage poverty, punishing families for being poor rather than offering support.
- How it preys: Racial profiling, surveillance of poor parents (especially mothers), removal of children for non-abuse-related causes, and systems of foster care that cause further trauma.
- Who it targets: Poor, Black, Indigenous, and disabled families.
5. Workforce Exploitation (Especially of Low-Wage Workers)
- Why it’s predatory: It extracts labor without meeting basic needs, often relying on burnout, fear of job loss, and lack of alternatives.
- How it preys: Wage theft, union busting, gig economy exploitation, lack of benefits, unpredictable schedules, and unsafe work conditions.
- Who it targets: Immigrants, people of color, young workers, single parents, and the formerly incarcerated.
6. Housing and Real Estate
- Why it’s predatory: It treats shelter as a commodity instead of a human right and biological need.
- How it preys: Rent gouging, discriminatory lending, evictions, gentrification, and corporate landlords that exploit legal loopholes to displace people.
- Who it targets: Renters, especially in marginalized neighborhoods, the homeless, disabled people, and the elderly.
7. Big Tech / Surveillance Capitalism
- Why it’s predatory: It monetizes attention, behavior, data, and emotion—often at the expense of mental health, privacy, and democracy.
- How it preys: Algorithmic manipulation, addictive design, misinformation, data harvesting, and exploitative labor practices in content moderation and gig work.
- Who it targets: Everyone, but especially children, teens, neurodivergent users, and those with low media literacy.
8. Immigration System
- Why it’s predatory: It criminalizes migration and exploits fear to justify abusive detention, family separation, and cheap labor.
- How it preys: Through long detentions, denial of asylum, deportation threats, and unsafe work environments for undocumented workers.
- Who it targets: Migrants fleeing violence, climate disaster, or poverty, often caused by U.S. foreign policy.
These systems function exactly as designed: to extract value from human beings while protecting entrenched power. They survive because they’re interwoven, reinforce each other, and are shielded by the myth of meritocracy and personal responsibility.
