Popehat: "The criminal justice system really is this malign and incompetent"

In a series of tweets

I get it. Epstein is one of the most famous and controversial prisoners in the world, a focus of immense media/political attention, and recently may have attempted suicide.

Therefore, you think, it is extremely implausible that jail officials would allow him to kill himself.

 But your assessment of plausibility is based on your assumptions about how the system works. Those assumptions are, mostly, wrong — naive Dick-Wolf-level law-enforcement-are-competent-good-guys stuff.

 You find it implausible because you think jailers would have to be freakishly incompetent to allow it to happen, and surely they aren’t. But they often are. You find it implausible because they would have to be wantonly indifferent to human life, and surely they aren’t. Dude.

 You find it implausible because jailers/law enforcement would surely get into huge trouble for letting something like this happen. Consequences? To law enforcement? For something happening to someone in custody? You gullible dipshit.

 In short, you find it implausible because you’ve accepted the fairy tale version of the criminal justice system, one utterly divorced from the reality. And you’ve managed to convince yourself that your view is “sophisticated” and that thinking this could happen is “naive.”

 Could there be more than malign indifference and incompetence? Sure. Maybe they hoped he would kill himself. Maybe he even bribed someone to look the other way so he could. Maybe there even is deliberate foul play.

 But if your belief is “it has to be murder, because nobody is this incompetent or indifferent,” you’re a willfully blind fool, a useful idiot for a despicable system.

That's the excuse I would use if I were the warden.  The "I'm not evil, I'm stupid" excuse.