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Comment by astazangasta | Hacker News Reader

I recently went to traffic court where i watched a young central American man get funneled into providing the state with free labor, merely because he was vulnerable and the opportunity was there. Our judicial system is for chewing up poor people. But it was ever thus; high-minded notions of justice cannot be carried by bureaucrats.

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I noticed the same thing one time in a very similar circumstance. One guy after another being assigned to state work that very day.

>Our judicial system is for chewing up poor people

Hyperbolic statement with absolutely no details about this situation? Seems legit.

The last time I was in court (two weeks ago) it was _filled_ with poor people for non-violent victimless crimes. And I was there for something that is NOT a law, written in plain English at DMV.org. But the cop wrote me a ticket so I have to waste countless hours of my life dealing with their shit.

Same deal if you stand in line at a car impound lot. I once got my car towed on a snowy night, one of ~1000 other cars towed that night in Minneapolis (on Christmas Eve no less!).

The line at the impound lot was filled with poorer (looking) people, especially Somali, Hispanic, and Asian people for whom English was not their first language. My dad drove me there and stood in line with me, and I could tell it had a profound effect on his outlook. My dad has always been quite liberal, but being a rich, older white guy living in the suburbs, he hadn't seen firsthand some of the more subtle ways that poor / minority people are disadvantaged by the system.

Are you saying that something is not a law because DMV.org says so, or that the cop thought something was a law because DMV.org said so? DMV.org is not a government website.

The court is an inefficient way of providing the state with free labor. He could have skipped the court and just gotten a job and started paying income taxes.

Tell it to the prison-industrial complex.

If everybody's metric of success is national maximized social/economic utility, your point would be fine. But that isn't the case. Many people prefer a positional metric, where they'd rather be poor as long as other people are poorer. See, e.g.:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268198...

If the point is money, then yes, you'd be right. But for a lot of people the point is status, not money. Taking a vulnerable or visibly different group of people and forcing them into a subordinate state is going to feel like success to a lot of people.

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