" What’s happened now, in this new era of settlements and nonprosecutions, is that the state has formally surrendered to its own excuses. It has decided just to punt from the start and take the money, which doesn’t become really wrong until it turns around the next day and decides to double down on the less-defended, flooring it all the way to trial against a welfare mom or some joker who sold a brick of dope in the projects. Repeat the same process a few million times, and that’s how the jails in America get the population they have. Even if every single person they sent to jail were guilty, the system would still be an epic fail—it’s the jurisprudential version of Pravda, where the facts in the paper might have all been true on any given day, but the lie was all in what was not said. "

― Matt Taibbi , The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap