I'm a good listener. I was very interested in the topic of staying out of jail, and I asked the right questions. That ride turned out to be one of the best short courses I ever took, one focused on surviving police encounters on the street. I'll never forget what he said. The most important thing I learned from him was that it's not the police that lock you up.
People lock themselves up.
Most people put themselves in jail, because they don't know their rights and they don't know how to defend those rights. They are playing a game and don't know the rules. Either that or they get involved in some kind of stupid ego struggle that irritates some policeman enough that he is willing to go through the inconvenience of locking them up. In fact, this criminal lawyer told me that he spent most of his time trying to undo the damage that his clients did to themselves after they were in contact with the police. It was what they did after the crime, when they collaborated with the police to get themselves incarcerated.