Our Current Penal System is a Joke
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
I remember that as all hope depends on the unreasonable man. It's a quote from George Bernard Shaw.
He's talking about a visionary who persists in the face of obstacles. Not all unreasonable men are high minded, wonderful visionaries of that sort, no.
I think a lot of people today have no idea what is reasonable.
I have read that heirs who inherit wealth and live beyond their means typically overspend in exactly the same way right up until the money is gone, the credit card is cancelled, the car is repossessed etc. They never ramp it down to try to extend how long the money will last.
Historically, it may have been easier to assess what was reasonable or sustainable as a big picture thing because things were much more local. And famine was fairly frequent and provided brakes on unreasonable expectations from people in power.
The sons of the upper classes in Europe served as officers in the military and it wasn't uncommon for many of their sons to die in battle before these young men had any opportunity to be in charge. The wars waged by kings or similar often were paid for in part with the blood of their own kin, which was a kind of reality check that billionaires and elected political leaders seem to lack today.
There is a book called Never Split the Difference. I've never read it though I've read other negotiating books.
The title reminds me of arguments I had with my ex where I felt like I was doing eighty percent and he was doing ten percent and he felt that offering to "split the difference" was "generous" on his part because it meant he would be doing fifty percent more than he was currently doing and he felt I shouldn't mind doing another five percent of the total because it was hardly anymore than I was currently doing.
I was typically saying "No, I'm already doing eighty percent and I need you to pick up the remaining slack and do a total of twenty percent. Yes, it's twice what you are currently doing, but it's a quarter of what I'm currently doing and I don't have more to give."
Historically, we had practices like outlawry where bad people were declared outside the law and not under the protection of the law because the jurisdiction in question simply didn't have the resources to deal with them effectively. So if you were bad enough, anyone could kill you and/or take your stuff for any reason and they were not committing a crime.
Outlawry formally recognized the limits of the world and the people in it.
If you were a thoroughly awful person, the system stopped wasting resources on extending you legal rights and legal protections. The system stopped trying to reform you. The system stopped trying to hunt you down and lock you up.
It just announced you had lost all right to participate in the legal system because you were not participating in good faith and we just don't have it to give. The next person who has had enough of your shit is more than welcome to kill you and we will not charge them with a crime.
This is not entirely different from the concept that "the honor system" applied only to other knights because knights had been educated in what the rules of the honor system were and so when granted benefits of the honor system, could reasonably be expected to play by the rules. Outsiders not schooled in what that meant could not expect to be granted graces of this system because you couldn't reasonably expect them to be trustworthy and follow the rules since they simply didn't know the rules.
I have heard that horrible people like murderers were somewhat often offered the opportunity to be part of the initial attacking party in a siege. If they survived the battle, they would have their record expunged and become landed nobility.
This was done because the initial attack in a siege was basically a suicide run. No one was expected to survive it. If you got volunteers from the prison population, you could afford to promise them the moon because odds were long against you having to actually make one or two of them landed nobles.
It was also done because it took something like twenty farmers to support one person in a role other than "peasant" and so those roles needed to be valuable and productive roles, like king or blacksmith, NOT "Asshole freeloading on society and getting free food and shelter because he's a criminal."
This deal was a left-handed means of executing most of your worst criminals in exchange for getting help you desperately needed under difficult circumstances upon which the fate of your country might depend. And for which you didn't need to feel guilty because it was a chance at redemption and a better life for a lot of wretches who likely all had terrible lives every step of the way before this moment.
In subsistence cultures, you literally cannot AFFORD a large, persistent prison population. That guy needs to carry his weight in some manner or stop being part of society.
I have read pieces that speculate that IF the X-Men were real, we should probably bring back the practice of outlawry rather than spend ridiculous sums of money and manpower on trying to find an effective means to lock up Magneto only to have him escape over and over and over and continue his crime spree.
It makes for a kind of job security for creative types wanting to write sequels but if someone like Magneto were real, this would be a truly terrible policy to just keep him alive at all costs and let him keep murdering people and never seek to execute him.
Our current penal system in the US is a huge mess. We KNOW for a FACT that many prisoners are Black Americans being warehoused and denied a life because they were born Black and our laws and our penal system contain systemic biases which make it extremely likely that a Black American will end up convicted of something at some point no matter how hard they try.
And when they are convicted, a Black man will serve a longer sentence on average than a White man for the same crime. It's extremely similar to the fact that a woman who kills her abusive husband in self defense will do more time than most abusive husbands do if they finally beat their wife to death.
We also know for a fact that many people are effectively beyond the law, largely due to being obscenely wealthy.
They will hire a high priced lawyer, get a slap on the wrist and pay a FINE. And they will tell you to your face that such costs are just "The cost of doing business."
And, no, they won't lose sleep over it, feel bad about anything they've done nor be deterred from doing it again.
How we fix all this, I don't know. But perhaps it's time we start contemplating solutions that will make obscenely wealthy people feel that the law actually applies to them too and isn't just a GAME involving an annoying court appearance and minor nuisance fine.
And perhaps one solution would be to decide that if you feel the law doesn't apply to you and is a joke and a game because you're rich, the courts could agree with you that the law doesn't apply to you and then list you as an outlaw.
Instead of letting rich people use the law to protect themselves while openly laughing at the idea that anyone can tell them "no" and actually enforce it.
Because currently the system just helps extremely unreasonable people make the completely rational decision to do any damn thing they want and expect to get away with it. Because they do get away with it and have for decades, so, no, it's not crazy or irrational for them to believe that is how it works.
It's objectively a FACT.
What's crazy is that everyone else agrees to spend public resources on protecting their vast wealth KNOWING these people don't abide by the rules and will openly laugh in your face at the idea that they should care about the rules at all.
Except of course if THEY want to sue or something.
Footnote
Possession is nine tenths of the law. If you're a billionaire and declared an outlaw, you probably effectively have zero networth because I'm certain anyone and everyone will be happy to clean out your checking account, take over your mansion, claim your stocks etc. IMMEDIATELY.
It would be an insane money grab and these people who LAUGH at the law when they get dragged into court would suddenly be extremely painfully aware that you cannot be a billionaire if the law truly doesn't apply to you.