Meanness Is Having a Moment—and It Shouldn’t Be

When people visit our prison-based call centers for the first time, they brace themselves. Decades of headlines, pop culture, and political rhetoric have painted prison as chaotic, dangerous, and hopeless. You can see it in their eyes—curiosity wrapped in fear.

Then they step inside.

They see rows of cubicles, coffee brewing, and teams strategizing around whiteboards. It looks like any corporate office, except for the orange jumpsuits. But what truly surprises them is the culture.

Women celebrate each other’s wins and share what worked so the next woman can succeed. They coach, encourage, and lean on one another. No side-eye. No, “that’s not my job.” No posturing. In prison, no one cares where you came from, what title you used to have, or who you knew. Everyone starts at the same place, and that creates a kind of equality that most workplaces only talk about.

It’s a community with kindness at the center. And it’s the best I’ve seen in 30 years of business.

A Nation of Mean Girls

That irony stays with me because the emotional intelligence I see every day among incarcerated women is conspicuously absent in far too many corner offices and comment sections.

In politics, in leadership, and especially online, cruelty has become performative. Meanness masquerades as strength.

Social platforms feed off our appetite for it. A 2024 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the more a post attacked the “other side,” the more we rewarded it with likes and amplification. The crueler the content, the faster we clicked.

I’ve felt it. I’ve muted or unfollowed—not because of differing opinions, but because of tone. The smug certainty. The constant provocation. What once felt like connection now feels like a theater of self-righteousness.

The contrast couldn’t be more glaring.

A Different Kind of Strength

Inside prison, I’ve found something quieter. More grounded.

I’m not romanticizing incarceration. The system is deeply flawed, and its impact on families is devastating. But inside our centers, the women I work with have built a culture that many on the outside seem to have forgotten how to create.

They live and work together. They hold each other accountable, give second and third chances, and do it all without the noise of social media or the 24-hour news cycle.

One woman told me she was more fulfilled in prison than many of the guards who leave each day. “You can tell who’s hurting,” she said, “by how much joy they take in hurting others.” That line has stayed with me because I’ve seen that same dynamic play out in society.

I’ve seen it in CEOs who make a spectacle of firing people, leaders who weaponize feedback, and influencers who stir conflict for clicks. Power doesn’t always corrupt—sometimes it attracts the already wounded…the already cruel.

And we all pay the price.

This kind of cruelty doesn’t stay confined to offices or screens. The more we consume it, the more we bring it to work, home, and how we parent, teach, and lead. Kids absorb it and mirror it. Adults normalize it. We stop listening to understand. Real conversations begin to feel like comment sections—suspicious, sarcastic, one step away from attack. We don’t just shift what we tolerate; we shift who and what we admire.

Trust in institutions unravels. The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer found a crisis of confidence in leadership, fueled by polarization and the perception that leaders prefer division to solutions. The very institutions once expected to guide us now model behaviors we wouldn’t tolerate in our own children.

What If We’re Looking in the Wrong Places?

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from these prison centers, it’s that people can change—and so can culture. But not through shame or spectacle. We don’t fix a culture of cruelty with more cruelty. We fix it by rebuilding a baseline of decency and refusing to reward anything less.

And we should want to fix it because the tone we set becomes the legacy we leave. Our kids are watching, and they’re learning who to be by watching who we are.

Some of the most human, collaborative, compassionate, and emotionally intelligent work I’ve seen happens in the place we’re taught to fear. Meanwhile, the places we’re taught to respect—the office of the presidency, Congress, boardrooms, newsrooms—fuel the exact opposite. That’s not just ironic—it’s a war