And as I said, I am not a fan of having an encounter with the justice system send you down a spiral of Kafka-esque inability to recover. Also, I fully agree that some (few!) jurisdictions turn the policing into a pseudo-revenue source, which is not reasonable and should be regulated against with sensible laws.
But my exactly related point is that at some stage of thinking, you will confront the question of "how hard do we have to keep on trying to make things easier for people to deal with the consequences of their actions?" And, what are we trying to get to as a goal?
We are not going to rid the world of crime. We are not going to be able to hand deliver people to court who forgot their court date. We are not going to be able to alleviate every person of the stresses in life that they encounter. How much should we do?
Of course we shouldn't put artificial barriers in people's way to trip them up. And if something is easy to help them avoid trouble, by all means. It's only in a government's interest not to cause people to spiral into criminality with no way out. It's a cost on society! You would be dumb not to see that.
As a middle class person, it's easy for me to say all this, yes. Admitted. But neither do I reflexively believe that "victim blaming" is a reasonable full excuse against all the trouble a person gets into in life.
Now, whether there is something systemic about our country, people, government, and the widening gulf between rich and poor (or in my words, people capable of getting through daily life successfully) is growing and increasingly causing more than some people can handle -- well, that is a bigger question that I don't know the answer to.
And as I said, I am not a fan of having an encounter with the justice system send you down a spiral of Kafka-esque inability to recover. Also, I fully agree that some (few!) jurisdictions turn the policing into a pseudo-revenue source, which is not reasonable and should be regulated against with sensible laws.
But my exactly related point is that at some stage of thinking, you will confront the question of "how hard do we have to keep on trying to make things easier for people to deal with the consequences of their actions?" And, what are we trying to get to as a goal?
We are not going to rid the world of crime. We are not going to be able to hand deliver people to court who forgot their court date. We are not going to be able to alleviate every person of the stresses in life that they encounter. How much should we do?
Of course we shouldn't put artificial barriers in people's way to trip them up. And if something is easy to help them avoid trouble, by all means. It's only in a government's interest not to cause people to spiral into criminality with no way out. It's a cost on society! You would be dumb not to see that.
As a middle class person, it's easy for me to say all this, yes. Admitted. But neither do I reflexively believe that "victim blaming" is a reasonable full excuse against all the trouble a person gets into in life.
Now, whether there is something systemic about our country, people, government, and the widening gulf between rich and poor (or in my words, people capable of getting through daily life successfully) is growing and increasingly causing more than some people can handle -- well, that is a bigger question that I don't know the answer to.