If your business has lost 25% of its customers what do you do? Do you find ways to generate new customers, maximize the value of old customers, and tailor your dealings with your customers with these needs in mind?
The law industry (police, judges, lawyers, etc.) has lost a lot of 'customers' over the last 20 years. Crime rates are down considerably. Fortunately for the industry, they've been able to co-opt our so-called leaders into passing new crazy and out of this world laws aimed at restoring the customer base through the middle class, a previously untapped source of 'criminality' in our once free society. We The People don't particularly care for having our lives, and our families lives destroyed this way, but who cares right? The law is the law no matter how little support it has.
This is why we see these really unusual anomalies in our system, this is why person A gets the book thrown at them but person B has hundreds of charges and convictions and is let off virtually scot-free.
Are there examples? Of course. On the one hand, the book is thrown at middle class taxpayer and cafe owner Marisol Simoes, a 'new customer' that is never likely to be a customer again and is only a customer this time because make believe laws were created to snare her, laws she never imagined existed, and won't be fooled again. She got into trouble due to a non-violent dispute with a customer, one which would normally have been resolved in civil court but there's no value to the criminal injustice system in that eventuality. So to maximize profit on this one time customer the severest sentence possible is given to this middle class citizen with no prior convictions of any kind whatsoever.
As to Marisol's children? Well they go without their mother. With any 'luck' this will affect them in such a negative way that eventually they too will become part of the system, more good customers to cash in on.
On the other hand, lets discuss Delores Pearl Robinson and her sister Molly Christina Robinson, shall we? These two clowns, in their most recent incident, physically assaulted a bus driver. This was physical not some files on the internet like Marisol. The damage to the driver is permanent. It turns out that these two twisted sisters have 450 and 250 arrests respectively. Most of them for violence-related offenses. They have yet to serve as much time in jail as Marisol Simoes was sentenced to in one non-violent disagreement.
But then they're good customers. If you give them stiff sentences you'll frighten them off and they may stop being good customers any longer. So they get no penalties and keep coming back for more and this employs police, judges, prosecutors, a whole whackload of employees committed to lots of expensive overtime and the business of law hums along nicely. Very profitable ladies indeed. The last thing you'd want to do in your business is drive them away.
This is why we see these seemingly strange situations where some miscreant has hundreds of convictions and no jail time and ordinary citizens who make one mistake get the book thrown at them. It's all about keeping the industry as productive and profitable as possible. This is also about as far away from what we want from our system as can be imagined, but who are we? We just pay the bills. And run all the risks. Being killed or jailed are increasingly the only options we have in our middle class lives. Funny thing about the middle class though. You can push it so far but then it bites back. Hard.
