Fatalists Are Made, Not Born

The "justice" system is fundamentally broken. Or maybe it's working exactly as intended -- after all, it did take a black man and screw up his chances of getting ahead, with no remorse or accountability. Elias Fishburne was lucky enough to have been in good enough shape before his ordeal to have gotten back on his feet afterwards.

Another striking thing is how jaded all of the people who are part of the system are. Their view has been narrowed to encompass just their cramped bureaucratic role. They are so focused on their own coping -- through laziness, cynicism, and dehumanizing of others they interact with -- that they don't see the horrible effects both of the official procedure and of the way they go about implementing it. There's no passion for making the system work, or even for caring about its effects on others. Feeling so put-upon (in their narrow selfish way) by the system, they end up with a sort of passive trust in it -- evidenced, for example, by the assumption that any inmate passed to them by a previous link in the chain is definitely a criminal.