This is true of much of the justice system. Penalties aren't meant to curb certain specific behaviors, they're meant to be used as general control mechanisms fo

This is true of much of the justice system. Penalties aren't meant to curb certain specific behaviors, they're meant to be used as general control mechanisms for people who can't wiggle out of punshiment by one means or another. I think the advance of physical and digital surveillance is eventually going to force a reevaluation of what behavior we criminalize, because either otherwise-upstanding people start to get caught in the web (see: piracy for personal use in the 00s), or we see an increasing number of highly public instances of clearly malicious or neglectful actors sliding (which we're arguably already seeing wrt police brutality cases). We're inadvertently about to make the dystunction of our legal system everyone's problem, which is when you'll see change.