https://www.thenation.com/article/society/ssi-rules-families-poverty/
The Supplemental Security Income program (SSI) was created in 1972 under the Nixon administration to provide financial support to low-income seniors and disabled people. An effort to federalize state-level adult support programs across the country, SSI is a means-tested program—there are financial requirements to be eligible. In the case of SSI, as of its last adjustment in 1989, enrollees cannot have savings of more than $2,000 as an individual or $3,000 as a family. Furthermore, SSI beneficiaries are prohibited from having retirement accounts, life insurance policies, certain types of personal property, funeral/burial policies, and access to other types of income.
[emphasis mine]
OMG I'm gonna test some means! 
The charge categories are becoming less and less relevant as it’s getting more and more likely that they just summarily execute you
Word. Anyone who looks at US convictions and sees that something like 98% of federal convictions and 95% of state convictions are obtained via plea bargains? That's not a legal system, that's forced confessions. "I don't give a shit if you did it. Sign the paper and you get two years plus probation. Force this to go to trial and you get 10 years. Now sign."
If this was an "in bad country" thing everyone would assume those rates were gotten under torture. Like America is so efficient we don't even bother with show trials, we just force them to confess and send them to prison.
The threat of a long sentence at the end of a trial if you lose is one aspect, but the really insidious part is that you'll probably spend longer locked up (in pre-trial detention) regardless of whether you are found innocent, compared to just taking the plea bargain.
and often people in county lockup are postively wistful for DOC prison time. 23/7 lockdown, often maximum security facilities and because of overcrowding, 3 or 4 to a cell
obviously don't get me started on jails in the desert states of the U.S.
it's designed to break you even though you are technically "innocent until proven guilty"
In Norway they have a queueing system (
) where you can be sentenced to prison but put on a waitlist until a slot opens up.
It can really fuck with people because they don't know when the government is going to pick them up and chuck them in prison (only that it will happen in the next couple of years)
What's even the point? If they're not enough of a threat to society to be immediately isolated then this is just pure sadism.
Perfectly efficient technocratic sadism