“Comfort for Compliance: The Origins of Colorado’s Incentive Pods”

 By Chaddrick Thomas

In 2008 or 2009, the Colorado Department of Corrections was on the verge of collapse—staff shortages, facility-wide lockdowns, and rising unrest inside the walls. The system was burning out, and incarcerated people had had enough.

There were no riots—but there was resistance.

Sit-ins. Refusals to work. Peaceful protests against inhumane conditions.

Lockdowns, in turn, brought operations to a standstill—no food, no laundry, no sanitation. Staff couldn’t manage the chaos.

So the DOC came up with a plan—not to solve the problem, but to control it.

They called it the Incentive Pod.

The Birth of Psychological Control

At first glance, the Incentive Pod looked like progress.

Designated for “model inmates,” the unit came with small comforts:

• Softer mattresses
  
  
• Gaming systems
  
  
• Access to microwaves, couches, and TVs
  
  
• A completely different menu of food—real food
  
  

But there was a catch: to be placed in the Incentive Pod, you had to agree to work through lockdowns.

That meant cooking, cleaning, laundry, or sanitation—jobs that everyone else, locked in their cells, could no longer perform.

It wasn’t about rehabilitation. It wasn’t about respect.

It was about utility.

Usefulness. Compliance. Control.

The pod was a pressure valve for a system about to explode—and they marketed it as a reward.

Obedience Over Opportunity

The message was clear:

Do what we say, when we say it, and we’ll give you crumbs of humanity.

Challenge the system—and we’ll take everything from you.

This wasn’t about self-improvement.

It was about behavioral leverage.

Incentive status didn’t mean you were growing. It meant you were playing by their rules—quietly, consistently, and without resistance.

The pod was never about progress. It was about pacification.

Incentive as Engineered Deprivation

Here’s the real game:

The things they offered in the Incentive Pod weren’t special.

They used to be standard.

That’s the part they don’t want the public to know.

• Better meals? We used to have them.
  
  
• Reasonable beds? We used to sleep on them.
  
  
• Access to TVs, decent recreation, and respectful treatment? That was normal.
  
  

I watched them systematically strip these things away from the general population.

Not because of budget cuts. Not because of security risks.

But because they wanted to repackage what was already ours and resell it to us under the label of “privilege.”

They intentionally worsened the living conditions for everyone else—especially in close custody and medium facilities.

They made the food worse. They made the mattresses cheaper. They made daily life more miserable.

And once we were desperate enough…

they gave those things back—but only to those who obey.

That’s not incentivizing. That’s conditioning.

That’s psychological warfare.

The Slippery Expansion

Today, this philosophy runs through the entire Colorado DOC like a virus.

• You want a healthy meal? Be incentive status.
  
  
• You want to pursue a college education? Stay misconduct-free.
  
  
• You want a mattress that doesn’t deform your spine? Earn it.
  
  
• You want to be treated like a human being? Comply.
  
  

It started as a policy.

Now it’s doctrine.

The incentive structure has become the justification for denying basic rights to the majority of people inside—creating a two-tiered system that rewards silence and punishes struggle.

And it didn’t happen by accident.

It happened by design.

Final Word

They said it was a reward.

But what they created was a psychological plantation.

A new slave system that doesn’t use chains—it uses comfort.

Colorado’s prison system didn’t evolve.

It engineered suffering—and then sold back relief at the price of obedience.

And now, that framework controls every aspect of incarcerated life.

This is just the beginning.

In the next installment, we’ll expose how DOC took basic human survival—food, health, safety—and weaponized it as a tool of coercion.

Because when you make someone earn their right to be treated like a human being…

you’re not incentivizing growth. You’re perfecting oppression.