there are so many ways humans can resolve disputes without surrendering their personal agency to the legal justice system

a thing a thought was very smart that Brian Howe posted on the poetics list; it is this surrender of personal agency when someone resorts to the legal justice system and / or the systems supporting twelve stepping, and various other types of behavioural interventions, to affect the behaviours of others; the tendency is for lower middle class, working class, working poor, and poor people, who are already more familiar with the unfriendly end of the legal justice system and these other systems (including religious support systems) to resort to it most -- and it does seem to be a sort of surrender