My experience with the federal court system and the Bureau of Prisons has given me a perspective that is very different from someone who has only observed the system from the outside.

I can tell you from personal experience that the BOP, the federal courts, and the various law-enforcement agencies operating within the federal justice system do not operate according to some simple racial hierarchy. In my experience, your skin color is not what determines how the federal system treats you. I would go even further and argue that “white privilege,” as it is commonly used today, is an oversimplified framework for understanding what actually happens inside the federal justice system.

What we absolutely do have and what I believe is considerably more consequential is wealth privilege.

The more money you have, the more resources you can put behind your defense. You can hire better attorneys, retain experts, investigate your case more thoroughly, challenge evidence, negotiate more effectively, and generally make the government work harder to obtain a conviction. In some circumstances, having sufficient money and resources can mean avoiding prison entirely. Someone without those resources simply does not have the same ability to fight the government.

That disparity is very real, and I saw it firsthand.

Where I disagree strongly is with the idea that the federal justice system is primarily organized around race. The system is enormous, bureaucratic, imperfect, and frequently driven by institutional incentives. America has also built an enormous incarceration infrastructure around the idea that imprisonment is the default response to a wide range of offenses. Once you have that much infrastructure, that many institutions, that many employees, and that much money tied to incarceration, there are inevitably powerful incentives to keep the machinery operating.

I am not claiming that every person in the system is corrupt or that every case is unjust. Quite the opposite. My experience showed me that the system is generally functional, but it is also an enormous machine with thousands of moving parts and institutional incentives that have little to do with the simplistic racial narratives people often use to explain it.

If you want to understand where privilege actually matters in the federal justice system, I would start with money.

The person who can afford an exceptional defense has a fundamentally different set of options from the person who cannot. That difference can affect everything from pretrial litigation to sentencing to the amount of time someone ultimately spends incarcerated.

In my experience, the most consequential privilege in the federal justice system isn't the color of your skin. It's the depth of your wallet.