To Cage a Wild Bird critiques carceral capitalism, a system in which imprisonment and punishment are treated as commodities for profit. The novel’s city-state, Dividium, commercializes its justice system through Endlock, a prison where citizens pay to hunt inmates. This premise mirrors real-world concerns about the prison-industrial complex, particularly the role of private prisons. For-profit prison corporations, such as CoreCivic and GEO Group, have faced criticism for lobbying for stricter sentencing laws and benefiting financially from high incarceration rates, as documented by organizations like The Sentencing Project (Gotsch, Kara and Vinay Basti. “Capitalizing on Mass Incarceration: U.S. Growth in Private Prisons.” The Sentencing Project, 2 Aug. 2018).

Similarly, Endlock’s profitability is a central concern for its officials. Captain Flint even reduces the protagonist Raven’s bounty payment because her captive is “damaged goods,” noting that “the broken ones bring in less for Endlock” (9). Dividium also commodifies suffering as entertainment. The prison advertises “budget-friendly hunting package[s]” (5), and hunters collect inmates’ teeth as “morbid trophies—status symbols” (4) or have them made into jewelry. This practice reflects a societal phenomenon sometimes called “dark tourism,” where sites of tragedy or violence, like graveyards, battlefields, and concentration camps, become tourist attractions (Caffrey, Cait. “Dark Tourism.” EBSCO, 2024). By presenting punishment as a spectator sport and a commercial enterprise, the novel explores how a society can become desensitized to brutality when it is framed as a source of profit and leisure.