With New York City making the decision to shut down Rikers Island, and Americans increasingly aware of the deep inequities of the current justice system, one would almost think the U.S. is on the brink of reconsidering the carceral state. And yet, two weeks after New York’s City Council voted to shutter its infamously cruel penitentiary, the city is embroiled in a fresh law-and-order controversy: police brutality on the subway, following Governor Andrew Cuomo’s summertime decision to flood the transit system with cops.

Pointing to reports that the subway system was losing $300 million annually to fare evaders, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) in June announced a crackdown, stopping and fining every turnstile jumper they can catch. To do so, they injected 500 MTA and NYPD police officers into the subway system. So far, this has gone about as well as one might expect, with recent reports of riders—particularly black riders—being tackled and tased over the cost of a subway ride. To the detriment of the entire city, Cuomo and MTA leaders have decided that criminalizing poverty and leaning on fines are the best approach to dealing with the MTA’s financial insecurities.

The cost of riding the subway has risen dramatically in the past five decades, and not entirely because of inflation: The subway fare in 1980 was $0.60, which in today’s currency would be $1.75, a whole dollar cheaper than the actual current rate. The MTA does offer a reduced fare that is half of the $2.75 fare that most have to pay, but it is reserved for riders who are over the age of 65 or living with a disability.

While the MTA takes in some $4.5 billion annually in bus and subway fares, decades of neglect by New York governors and MTA heads have left the subway’s century-old switch system and other infrastructure in dire need of updating, triggering a crisis in 2017 and routine delays to this day. To fix this, the city has paid enormous contracts to external construction companies—per a July 2017 study, the MTA’s operating costs had “outpaced inflation by 50%” since 2002.

And so, instead of the MTA and Cuomo fixing the public transit system from the top-down as critics have proposed, it is looking to replace full-time employees with contractors and finance a fine-heavy police force, all to achieve the hopeless goal of fully paying off its debt, which is at $44 billion and counting. In the meantime, New Yorkers stare at advertisements plastered in the subway cars instructing them to simply pay the $2.75 opposed to the $100 fine for evading. Announcements buzz over the PA system, admonishing the less fortunate for soliciting spare change, telling riders to not give them money and instead reserve their crumpled dollars for charities or shelters. Meanwhile, other trains still crawl through the tunnels and sit for minutes with their doors open in the station without making a single announcement.