I’m not sure anyone is really engaging you here, so let me give it a go.

Three years ago, I was you. I thought I wasn’t blind to the problems in the US, but that we fundamentally had a solid system that did its best. Insofar as racial injustice permeated the system, that was a product of racist cops/prosecutors, but a problem that would solve itself as better, younger people, with fewer prejudices, slowly rotated in. I realized I was wrong after Trump became president.

Not the way you might think, though. It wasn’t the series of stories of the things Trump did (and does) that showed me how wrong I was. It was the stories about the things people conveniently started blaming on Trump. Now that we had a legit villain in the White House, the press started dredging up horror stories—but as often as not, from before the administration took power!

So I started reading. And I read about how qualified immunity means cops can do anything to you as long as a court hasn’t previously ruled is unconstitutional. I read about how courts will not decide on constitutionality if they don’t have to—meaning that finding qualified immunity means that the constitutionality wouldn’t be ruled on, leaving the act legal!

I found out that prosecutors will charge defendants with absurd numbers of crimes that they know they can’t prove in order to force a plea deal, because they know the vast majority of defendants can’t afford the legal representation to avoid conviction.

I found out that if you do have means of hiring competent counsel, it is not unheard of for the government to freeze your assets, alleging they proceeded from your crime, so you can’t pay for your defense.

In other words, I found out the US criminal justice system is a giant machinery that takes in people and spits out shattered lives, and that your best hope in life is that its Eye of Sauron won’t turn to look at you.

So how did it get that way? I’ll propose three theories and hopefully explain why the last one is the one I subscribe to.

First, the American people may just be evil. But I don’t buy that, because nations aren’t evil, and everyday people just want to get by. Also, they live under this system; it’s a particularly stupid sort of evil that harms itself.

Second, the American people are oblivious. This one is true, but insufficient. By a “hilarious” cultural “accident”, the vast majority of the system’s horrors fall on the powerless and the poor (by "coincidence", minorities, particularly African American); the rest of society tends to live in a reasonable world. However, that doesn’t explain why things are bad for the victims; cops and prosecutors should be no more likely to be evil than the rest of the population, and yet they are the ones turning the gears of the meat grinder.

Third: the system structurally encourages the behavior. That’s the one everyone is arguing for. Measuring conviction rates (how insane is that?), needing to be seen as tough on crime, those provide the push. Then, removing the guardrails of prosecutorial accountability (prosecutors are almost never sanctioned, even in egregious cases of misconduct) and police restraint leads to the rest.

We are putting good people in a position where the only rational thing to do is to destroy lives to make a number go up, and we remove or don’t enforce the rules that would give any semblance of fairness. Inevitably, the most successful ones will be the ones operating outside the expected rules. As for the ones who refuse, their motivations don’t matter; the system will grind them down as surely as it will grind down its other victims.