Why Do Good People Go To Prison?
I suspect you already know why, but lets confirm.
I regularly see a lot of posts online where people will have posted a meme or a message comparing a person being convicted aggressively for a trivial offence, and another person who breaks the biggest laws imaginable, asking, why does that happen?
I’m going to honest here, my only legal qualifications come from Armchair University (well, not entirely true, but the legals I have count for zero here), so take my observations with a grain of salt. That said, I hope to provide some insights.
“Only the rich can get justice, only the poor cannot escape it.”
Words of Henry Demarest Lloyd, a muckraking journalist who exposed the collusion by Standard Oil Company, ultimately leading to the Sherman Antitrust Act, if anyone knows what corruption looks like, it’s he.
Jussie Smollet, a man who tried to incite violence between political parties by staging a “hate crime”, managed to walk free, not even serving 5 months prison, effectively being punished with nothing. Rich. Meanwhile, Canadian pastor Artur Pawlowski who criticised the Canadian government’s tyranny faces 4 years in jail. Poor.
I mean, who can forget OJ Simpson? High powered lawyers pulled him out of that one.
Why Can Only The Rich “Get Justice”?
There are a number of factors. The most obvious is the amount of money affords them the most talented, most knowledgeable, or lacking either, at least in Amber Heard’s case, the most persistent lawyers.
Obviously, poor people can only afford some of the cheapest, half-assed lawyers with the least amount of experience (assuming they can afford any at all). If they can’t afford one, they’re handed one by the State.
And often I’ve observed injustice by State supplied attorneys, lawyers and (in the UK) solicitors, who either intentionally collude with the State, or they do a half-assed, ‘get them seen to as fast as possible’ approach.
Why? Well, they’re paid for by the State, so they can’t exactly irk off their paymaster. If they did a really good job of beating the government, they’ll either be:
Let go by the State, no longer requiring their services given it costs the government money to litigate and if their own financed services do too well they’ll lose even more money (filtering out the moral guardians), or
Picked up by high paying firms (filtering out the talent)
The other reason is State-appointed lawyers often have a very large workload. You’re not the only client in their case list. The police probably pick up crooks a dime-a-dozen, which means dozens of clients per State-appointed lawyer. A paid one is at least (in theory) dedicated to you.
The Government Is Rich Too
You might not consider the debt-laden US government “rich” (technically speaking it is poorer than everyone), but from a power standpoint the government is “richer” than the poor person they’re seeking to litigate against.
They have printing money, millions of dollars to throw against the wall. You’ve got many a few thousand in the bank - assuming the government seize it as ‘illegal proceeds’ and deny you even that. There’s a huge power imbalance here.
However, “rich” here is relative. The government is richer than the poor people, but it is not richer than the actual rich, who wield both money, and often times popularity, which means they have thousands, if not millions, of zombie-like zealots who will scream their name, not forgetting the media.
The Rich Are Richer Than Most Government Departments
If you consider the budget of the Chicago police - who aimed to convict Jussie Smollet - and then consider how much Jussie Smollet was paid in a year, you’ll probably come to the conclusion that Jussie likely earns more than the entire police department does.
This means, in a fight to the death, Jussie can out-resource the police department. Amazon has roughly a trillion dollars in assets (admittedly most not in the form of liquid assets like money), which is more than what most States have in total for all budgets.
As a result, most governments have learned not to get into protracted legal battles with rich and wealthy people. Not only does it mean sapping taxpayers’ money to do so, but even if successful, means constant appeals which sap even more money and time and resources. And if said rich person also provides a lot of the economy to their State, a loss of jobs and very angry taxpayers.
Put short, rich people are like a ton of hair in the sink blocking up the drain. They can clog up the entire legal system with their vast resources, waging non-stop proxy wars, campaigns, litigation, popularity contests/raids (think BLM protests), non-stop harassment.
Angry Taxpayer Problem
This saps a lot of money from police and legal departments, which means even if successful, they have no budget left to permit them to prosecute others. In the totem pole hierarchy, Jussie Smollet with his fake hate crime ranks lower than say, a murderer with no savings in his account.
This also invokes the angry taxpayer problem for a lot of departments, because taxpayers will see this as a ‘suboptimal waste of taxpayers (limited) money’. And it backfires on police and legal departments’ reputation as well if they fail to prosecute/
It produces a double-whammy effect: the ones supporting the police see the police as inept, and the ones who defended the prosecuted feel justified the police were wrong. As a result, both sides agree the punishment should be a reduction in funding for police and legal departments.
Which means even less money to prosecute people who have deep pockets with.
The Door Swings The Other Way, Too
This means it is cheaper and more effective for police and legal departments to prosecute poor people, because they don’t classically have the finances, popularity, reach or power to fight back.
They cannot afford appeals, they don’t ‘know people who know people’ who can call in favours, they don’t have the popularity of the public to hound the police into giving justice, they don’t have the high powered lawyers to write technicalities or file stellar defences. They have themselves and an overworked, very likely corrupt State-appointed lawyer and that’s it.
From a taxpayer’s perspective, the numbers look good too. Look how many people we’ve jailed, look how many arrests we’ve done (insert Ralph Wiggum) ‘we’re helping’. So the taxpayer is more inclined to a quantity over quality assurance.
Jussie Smollet isn’t likely to come to your house at night, but the crack dealer making ends meet down the road with the gun probably is. So naturally, the taxpayer focuses on the immediate problem, rather than the causes of it (EG Jussie’s attempts to incite which could create more crime overall).
Poor People Are A Revenue Stream
If you factor in the win:loss ratio of police versus poor and rich, you’ll recognise the police are much more likely to get money out of poor people via fines than they are out of rich people with more money to fight the fines with.
For you, paying the $100 fine is cheaper than hiring an attorney, and like most people, you will nearly always pay it. Even if you opt to self-represent, self-representation carries risk of failure which incurs a higher fine (which to me seems like a violation of Due Process as it seems like a fine for exerting your legal rights).
The time spent trying to self-represent - many hours - you could be spent just earning that money instead to pay the fine. So naturally, even the savvy self-representatives pony up in most cases. A lot of lawyers you hire will also advise this, as it’s often the cheapest route.
Reputation Dictates
So poor people are a natural free cash cow for police. However if they try to litigate rich people, they have money to waste and will fight any fine to the death because their reputation with the public is at stake. So even if they pay a lawyer $60k for a $100 fine, that $60k is money well spent because it’s cheaper than a PR fire for half-a-million. OJ Simpson might have ‘won’ his court case, but he lost in the opinion of the public.
Fighting such fines allows them to avoid accumulating the track record of being a crook in the public eye, and also serves the purpose of signalling to police they are no pushover, and ergo they shouldn’t even bother.
It’s a bit like combat where sometimes if you’re really aggressive against one person in a group, you can discourage the others from attacking you. Essentially it is the rich exerting dominance over the police.
Poor Incur Penalties
The poor cannot hold such a stand against police, as the more they fight back, the more aggressively the police will try to beat down on them (even literally), because if one poor person can make the police seem weak, it will signal to the rest to “attack”. Keep in line, peon.
Police know that poor people do not have the finances to fight the State, so they can keep dogpiling more and more fines, penalties, consequences etc for trying to resist the State. Obviously, if the police get dogpiled by a large number of people en-mass, they will retreat (sometimes also literally). There’s a power dynamic.
The Flaw In The System… Is You
‘What?!’ you’ll look at me incredulously, how dare I accuse you, pious saint member of the public, for these “crimes”. But it is indeed you. When Jussie Smollet walked free, I bet all you did was complained about it on Twitter, Facebook or some other social media site.
You know what Johnny Depp fans did? They hounded the police, courts, even Amber Heard. They (tried) to throw money at his case. They went after media outlets attacking Johnny Depp with an absolute zeal. They wrote posts, published videos, did a full campaign against media outlets. Whatever means they had, they did not stop, they practically dedicated themselves to it.
Did you spend every waking hour trying to get Jussie Smollet jailed? No? Do you advocate for expanding the Chicago police budget? (I bet you lied and said ‘yes’, but in truth I bet there’s a slew of posts of you being critical about taxes and how Americans shouldn’t pay tax).
Did you sit idly by as the ‘defund the police’ (DTP) movement took hold and succeeded? Writing on social media isn’t ‘action’. DTP went out and physically protested, physically hounded ‘representatives’, physically hounded police.
Do you just ignore the corruption of State-appointed lawyers? ‘Reading about it’ isn’t paying it attention. Reading is passive. If you do nothing to stop their corruption then you are enabling the problem.
The system is dictated by power, dear reader, and when you choose to allow your fellows to drown in the cesspool of corruption in politics and law, you are by your own admittance, not only enabling it, but supporting it. Your lack of action says ‘I am okay with this’. It doesn’t matter what your words are. I can say I can fly, doesn’t mean I actually can. I can say I’m your best friend, doesn’t mean I truly am though.
What actions have you undertaken today to fight the corruption?
Tolerance breeds complacency, complacency bring fruition.
Act.
Speak out.