http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/police-shootings-traffic-stops-excessive-fines
In Alabama, a circuit court judge, Hub Harrington, wrote a blistering opinion three years ago asserting that the Shelby County Jail had become a kind of "debtors' prison" and that the court system had devolved into a "judicially sanctioned extortion racket." This pattern leads to a cruel paradox: One arm of the state is paying a large sum to lock up a person who can't pay a small sum owed to a different arm of the state. The result? Bigger state deficits. As the director of the Brennan Center's Justice Program put it, "Having taxpayers foot a bill of $4,000 to incarcerate a man who owes the state $745 or a woman who owes a predatory lender $425 and removing them from the job force makes sense in no reasonable world."
The generation of revenue is the issue. The massive increase in petty laws and regulation fuels the incidence of interaction with the state. The state's power is force. Are we surprised by death?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/12/05/dont-support-laws-you-are-not-willing-to-kill-to-enforce/
As Carter points out later in his article, the scope of government regulation has grown so great that the vast majority of Americans have violated criminal law at one time or another. This sad state of affairs multiplies the opportunities for dangerous interactions between police and civilians, and virtually guarantees that abuses like this will recur.
So we don't properly fund police departments (and everything else government is supposed to do . . . instead we fund pensions and welfare and etc). The state then begins passing petty laws (and not so petty laws . . . see war on drugs) to have a basis to recoup funds . .. basically extract them at the point of a gun on the side of the road instead of the ballot box . . . where we say no.
