A lot of the cruft in the American criminal law system has to do with the fact that we’ve got a system nominally dedicated to punishing *wrong acts* (or ~rehabilitating~ the actors, wevs), but there’s such a desire for a system to get rid of *wrong people* that we end up working up kludges to use it that way, and then the True Believers try to apply barriers to that and then there’s more workarounds and back and forth until we’ve got a system that’s at once way too big and intrusive, full of loopholes that allow the resourceful to Do It Wrong in both directions.

Maybe what we need is a system like Athenian ostracism that lets us exile people on the basis that we simply want them out of the way, without bringing process or punishment into things, so it can bear that weight without mucking up the justice system.