Today I was working on yet another case where the guy was probably arrested as a result of cops harrassing him, but also, he's guilty.

Rich white people do drugs, steal, and hurt people, but they get away with it more than poor minorities do. It would actually help poor minorities to lock up more white people than to try to get guilty minorities off on technicalities. As a matter of public policy, I propose a quota for the number of rich white people to get locked up-- a sort of affirmative action plan for getting underrepresented populations into prison. Let me explain.

If rich kids went to jail, their parents would start donating wings and coffee lounges and cupcakes to those jails. They would also hound the administration about how their kids were treated and whether they were being enriched enough. Perhaps they'd make the prisons institute gifted and talented programs. If more white kids, rich or poor, were in jail, the public at large would wake up to the issue of prison conditions and rehabilitation in general. Because the public at large is just racist like that.

The sheer volume of whiny complaints and high-powered lawsuits would cripple the system. They'd have to scale back the number of people incarcerated. That would mean raising the bar for incarceration-- cutting loose drug dealers, for example, or decriminalizing drugs altogether. Meanwhile the people left in prisons would live under decent conditions, and more energy would go toward actually rehabilitating them.

So let's fire up that new white people prosecution unit, throw some extra cops on the Bleecker Street beat. Or we can keep on litigating motions about how cops shouldn't be allowed to arrest people they have warrants on.