The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap Highlight

If you just walked in off the street and watched that scene, you wouldn’t think much of it. But to people who do this for a living, the decision by a haggard and probably homeless streetwalker to pay a fine for a bad arrest comes down to an elaborate series of mathematical calculations, most of which the public has no conception of. In a vacuum, that prostitute’s case probably would have been tossed out. There was something wrong with the arrest, and if it were somehow to go all the way to trial, the state would probably lose, a fact seemingly recognized by all sides in their brief, ten-second deliberation. But the state doesn’t have to win at trial, a truth captured in another common expression in this courtroom: “The punishment is the process.”