The law lands hardest on the people least able to fight it.

When the status of being poor is the offense

The bluntest form of policing the poor is a law that criminalizes their condition. Louisiana's HB 211, signed in June 2026, makes sleeping outside punishable by jail and, for a repeat, by one to two years at hard labor — with even the “treatment” alternative able to compel unpaid labor from people who can't pay its costs. It is not an outlier: after the Supreme Court's 2024 Grants Pass ruling cleared the way and a 2025 federal order tied grant money to enforcement, roughly two dozen states and hundreds of municipalities followed — with California and Illinois among the leaders. Louisiana stands out for its severity, not for being alone. It is the same logic as the debtors'-prison courtroom in Dimension A, written into statute: punish the poverty, not the cause.

Whose crimes go uninvestigated

Policing the poor is as much about what the system refuses to do as what it does aggressively. The starkest example is the rape-kit backlog: across the country, hundreds of thousands of sexual-assault evidence kits have sat untested for years — physical evidence in violent crimes, collected from victims who are disproportionately poor, and then shelved. It is the mirror image of the hard-labor statute and the debtors' docket: the same institutions that will jail a person for sleeping outside will leave a rapist's DNA in a freezer. This is the thread we are assembling now — the crimes the system decides are not worth the work, and who is left unprotected when it does. A full-length breakout is in production.

Cages get the money that housing and courts don't

Every dimension above meets the budget in the same place. The carceral blank check documents the one line of public spending that is never called “too expensive” — jails, prisons, and enforcement — even as the housing, treatment, and legal-aid that would prevent the arrests go unfunded. It is why Louisiana can afford the hard-labor sentence but not the 100,000 homes it is short, and why the courtroom keeps processing the poor rather than diverting them. That fiscal choice is traced further in The Austerity Myth, which shows how “we can't afford it” is applied to everything but the cage.

The same accountability vacuum, armed and expanded

Immigration enforcement is the sharpest edge of the same pattern: a rapidly expanded 2025 workforce with guns, arrest power, and thin vetting, aimed at people with little ability to fight back. A July 2026 advocacy report from the Ohio Immigrant Alliance, “They Walk Among Us,” compiled 59 personnel charged or convicted of sexual and physical abuse. We don't take that list on faith — we grade it against the primary record in the case database and keep only what survives.

What survives is grim. Juan David Ortiz, a Border Patrol supervisor in Laredo, was convicted of capital murder in December 2022 for killing four women. Ronald Anthony Burgos-Aviles, a CBP agent, was convicted of capital murder in 2023 — affirmed on appeal in November 2025 — for killing his partner and his own infant son. David Brouillette, an ICE officer with a documented domestic-violence history, shot and killed Joan Sebastian Duran Guerrero during a July 2026 traffic stop in Biddeford, Maine; we say “shot and killed,” not “murdered,” because as of grading he has not been charged. The abuse extends behind the detention door, where a witness can be deported before they testify, and to officials who simply leave the country rather than face the case.

And this is exactly where discipline matters most. The report's claim that ICE official Samuel Saxon was promoted after offending is unproven, so we do not make it. Its framing of Brashad Johnson — “convicted of soliciting a minor” — does not hold: Johnson is a background-check contractor, not an agent; he was charged, not convicted; and the sting involved an adult officer, with the “minor” belonging to a separate case. We grade that framing FALSE / MISLEADING and keep it out of the roster. The overdrive is real; so is the discipline it demands from us.

When wealth buys the leniency the poor never get

Every dimension above describes the law landing hard on people who can't push back. The mirror image is just as documentable: at the top of the wealth scale, the sentence a poor defendant would expect simply doesn't arrive. Our the other tier grades five non-celebrity cases — chosen so the only variable that stands out is the money — in which private wealth coincided with extraordinary leniency: probation for a 16-year-old who killed four people driving drunk after an “affluenza” defense; probation for a du Pont heir who pleaded guilty to raping his three-year-old daughter; two years of house arrest, served in an oceanfront condo, for a fatal hit-and-run; and no prison at all for a billionaire who hid $107 million from the IRS. Each disposition is graded against the court record, and the honest limit is kept in view — a curated list of five is not a base rate. The systemic version of the same fact isn't the anecdote; it's cash bail, which jails hundreds of thousands of people pretrial for being unable to pay while a defendant with money walks out the same afternoon. It is the debtors' docket of Dimension A, read from the other end of the scale.