Among other injustices: prosecutors have an incentive to go after those who cannot mount a strong defense (and many tools to further reduce the ability of individuals to defend themselves via asset seizures, gag orders, and similar mechanisms).

This means that there's a great deal of prosecution of petty and minor crimes, including a huge number of convictions for drug offenses and for what amounts to "being poor". I'll add child support payments to this list: if the state sees a benefit in raising a child, why make that a burden on one specific individual, to the point of incarceration, particularly where circumstances may be less than clear (family law is like that). It's another area where decriminalization could very well have better results for all involved: less acrimonious court cases, better welfare for the child, and a lack of oppression on the alleged father.

Meantime: large and complex cases against those with means, whether drug kingpins, organized crime lords, or Wall Street bankers and traders (but I repeat myself) go under-prosecuted. The cases are more complex, yes, but the social harm presented also, IMO, greatly outweighs that of most petty crime.

Add in the psychological aspects of much crime, violent, white-collar, or otherwise, and there's a lot found wanting in the present US criminal and penal system.

Many moons ago one of the more interesting college courses I took was, of all things, a breadth-requirement literature class covering concepts of penal law. The reading included Michel Foucault[1], his book I, Pierre Riviere, Having Slaughtered my Mother, my Sister and my Brother[3], and Panopticon by Jeremy Bentham[4]. It's proven to be one of the more serendipitously fascinating and relevant courses in my entire college career.

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Notes:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_foucault I don't recall the specific work, an his bibliography is sufficiently extensive that it has its own wikipedia page[2].

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault_bibliography

3. http://www.amazon.com/Pierre-Riviere-having-slaughtered-brot... Reading this casually in a cafe or other public setting can itself be an interesting anthropological study.

4. http://www.amazon.com/The-Panopticon-Writings-Radical-Thinke...

It certainly is. If you wanted to design a system for getting innocent people to plead guilt you would be hard pressed to come up with a better system.

I wish that some prosecutor would "go rogue" and start applying all these tactics on nice middle class people. The outcry after a couple of weeks would be so great that something might be done about changing things.

Could I raise a somewhat academic question? The idea of conviction is binary: either you're convinced beyond reasonable doubt of guilt or you let the man go. In a way this is good, but in a way, because of it, prosecutors end up putting a lot of innocent people behind bars while defense attorneys get a lot of guilty people off the hook.

What if there is a slight -- repeat slight -- spectrum? Personally, I would not mind being theoretically "conditionally detained/penalized/sentenced" provided:

1. The penalty is low -- police surveillance, fine that will be returned if exonerated

2. You're compensated if exonerated

3. These penalties carry no more stigma than jury duty

A scheme like this might allow the criminal justice system to move a bit faster. Or does this sound completely outrageous?