While certain laws are overenforced (e.g., some drug use-related crimes, minor traffic violations) and some very serious laws are appropriately enforced (e.g., if someone commits a major bombing, substantial resources will go into tracking that person down, and the police do make some effort with murders generally), mainly, laws are not really enforced.

The civil system is no better: when you’re in the right, lawsuits are very rarely worth it because of the incredible monetary cost and investment in time and mental energy of using the legal system. This is really a great loss: someone can screw you over, and you have a legal right against them, but the system is so slow and expensive that it’s irrational to try to claim that legal right. Of course, there are exceptions: situations where you can use a small claims court for a fast result, or where the size of the damages is so great and the probability of winning so large that it’s worth it, or where a lawyer will take the case on contingency.

On the flip side, wealthy bullies and large companies can use the system very effectively because merely by suing someone, they inflict tremendous waste of money and time on that person. As they say, “the process is the punishment.” Unless a case is truly ridiculous or obviously invalid, it’s likely to waste a lot of the defendant’s time and money.

So basically, it’s a system that is often rational for abusers of it to use and rarely rational for victims to use.

In my view, the main value in the justice system for individuals is that the police will come if you call, and if they literally see someone committing a crime, they will arrest them (or if the crime is sufficiently serious AND the trail of evidence is ridiculously easy to follow to the perpetrator, they may be willing to follow it).

And that’s actually worth A LOT! The police being willing to come (hopefully!) fairly quickly when called and arrest someone they see committing a crime or who obviously carried out a crime (which is not true in every country) actually reduces crime tremendously (compared to the counterfactual), and provides us all with an extremely useful resource when crime is being committed. So that’s worth using whenever we need it!

But, unfortunately, beyond that one very useful function, in my opinion, the system does quite a bad job at producing justice.

In my personal experience, when serious crimes have been committed against people I’m close to, I can’t think of a single case where the legal system brought justice.

If we look at statistics broadly (based on a couple of different sources from 2020-2025), here are the appalling numbers of what percent of reported offenses are cleared in the US (where “cleared”, most of the time, means that someone is arrested, charged, and turned over to the court for prosecution):

• Motor vehicle theft: 9%-10%
• Larceny theft (non-violent personal theft): 12%-15%
• Burglary (involves illegally entering a structure): 13%-15%
• Robbery (taking property directly from a person with force or threat of force): 23%-28% cleared
• Rape: 26%-27% cleared
• Aggravated assault: 41%-46% cleared
• Homicide: 52%-55%

The reality is even more grim than these reported numbers, though, because (not including murder) a high percentage of crimes go unreported, and the above apply just to the selection that have been reported. For instance, by some estimates, more than 50% of violent victimizations and burglaries go unreported, and an even larger percentage of sexual assaults go unreported. That means that the probability that a crime leads to an arrest is substantially lower than the official clearance rates (which are already pretty depressingly low). For instance, the real clearance rate for burglary may be more like 6%.

The vision of the justice system that TV portrays – of police and district attorneys that spend tons of time on individual (non-murder) cases and doggedly pursue making sure that criminals get justice, while occasionally true, is usually a misleading distortion of the status quo. In real life, even with murder cases, more than 40% of them don’t lead to arrests.

I also want to make it really clear that while there are, of course, some incompetent people and some immoral people in the justice system (as there are in any system), for the most part, individuals are not to blame for these problems – police officers, judges, prosecutors, etc., are mostly genuinely trying to do their jobs well. These are systemic issues that are way beyond the ability of any individual to change.

It’s also worth noting that many people who commit crimes are repeat offenders, and so some of them actually do come to justice eventually (when they finally get caught for one of their crimes and are punished), it just may take a while. They roll the dice enough times that it finally catches up to them.

I hope I am  not discouraging you from reporting crimes – you should absolutely report them. Just don’t assume that the legal system is likely to bring justice – clinging to that hope can be quite detrimental.

This piece was first written on December 28, 2025, and first appeared on my website on January 21, 2026.

1. Soldier Altruists think it’s obvious how to improve the world and that we just need to execute those obvious steps. They see the barriers to a better world as:

(i) not enough people taking action (e.g., due to ignorance, selfishness, or propaganda), and

(ii) bad groups blocking things (e.g., corrupt politicians or greedy corporations).

2. Scout Altruists think it’s hard to figure out how to improve the world – and most attempts either don’t work, only slightly help, or make things worse. They see the barriers to a better world as:

(i) not enough understanding of causal mechanisms (e.g., due to a lack of high-quality evidence, not enough attention to the evidence we do have, not enough careful reasoning, etc.), and

(ii) too much investment in bad solutions (e.g., due to people jumping to conclusions, doing what feels good emotionally rather than what is effective, ideological blindspots, inertia, etc.)

Soldier Altruists say we need to DO and FIGHT more. Scout Altruists say we need to THINK and TEST more. Soldier Altruists are more likely to think that if we could just get people to be less selfish and more motivated to act, we would make a lot of progress towards a better world. Scout Altruists are more likely to think that if we could just get people to pay more attention to evidence and to have more good-faith debates with strong norms around the quality of argumentation, we would make a lot more progress.

Soldier Altruists may think Scout Altruists are far too reluctant to act and are wasting their time on research and debate. Scout Altruists may think Soldier Altruists are far too confident in their conclusions and are wasting their effort pushing for changes that aren’t going to help much (and which, in some cases, might even make things worse). Of course, in reality, there is a continuum between these two positions. So, on a scale from 0 (Soldier Altruist) to 10 (Scout Altruist) where do you fall? I’m probably a 7 or 8.

As some commenters have pointed out, there is a relationship between this distinction and “Conflict Theory” vs. “Mistake Theory.” I think it is related – but also distinct in important ways. Conflict theory says that there is a giant zero-sum struggle (groups fighting over fixed resources). Whereas in this case, we’re operating from a framework of altruism: “the world can be made a lot better – what’s the big barrier to that happening? Is it that we know what to do and we’re not doing it enough/with enough energy, or is it that we don’t really know what to do?”

Also, to clarify another important point brought up in the comments: I’m not asking, “do you think it’s obvious how we should improve the world if we had a magic wand that could change whatever we wanted?” – instead, the question is: “is it obvious what to do to improve the real world, given that we don’t have a magic wand?” Do we just need to put more money/time/effort/people into executing the current “obvious” strategies because they will work well if we just scale them up? Or is it pretty unclear what strategies we should even be putting more resources into (meaning that a lot of thinking, research, debate and/or evidence evaluation will typically be necessary to even figure out what is worth scaling up)?

Julia’s book (which I highly recommend): https://www.amazon.com/Scout-Mindset-Perils-Defensive-Thinking/dp/0735217556/ref=nodl_

This piece was first written on April 23rd, 2021, and first appeared on this site on January 7th, 2022.