"If you're poor and you commit a crime, the legal system works quickly and leaves you in pieces all over the highway. If you're educated and have money, the process becomes a drawn-out affair, like a terminal cancer patient who can afford various kinds of treatment all over the world. But eventually he ends up at Lourdes." -- James Lee Burke, "Heartwood"
For the uneducated, Lourdes is a Roman Catholic miracle-healing center in southern France, where thousands of wealthy Catholics sojourn.
The poor who get in trouble with the law can't afford an attorney and end up with a public pretender, er public defender, and they make a deal with the prosecution. They both work for the state of Arkansas.
Unfortunately, those with wealth can afford to hire an attorney who will do anything and everything to help them seek another form of justice.
They have a much better window of opportunity to make a deal which precludes the kind of "justice" the more unfortunate receive.
In other words, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, or are incarcerated because they couldn't afford that high, falutin' attorney.
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