Wherever it may be a product of instinctual maladaption, or epistemological blindness, or intentional malfeasance, or some combinations thereof, presently regnant underlords are in any case of course not displeased by this state of affairs, with their ‘processes’ being catastrophically ‘broken’, kafkaesque hells of fractal wrongness, since it means they can use the process itself as punishment. ‘Allegations’, ‘under investigation’, ‘claims’, ‘is accused of’, these arise like clouds of bloodsucking flies out of the swamp, which a scientific observer might curiously note how native swamp-creatures are passed by as if they were invisible, while they swarm like biblical plagues around any creatures of red-blooded vitality that dare step foot into the morass.

There is nothing that gets done except by personal connection between overlapping dunbar’s numbers of cadre, only whether it is explicit, or occulted. That is no less true in 9th century feudalism as it is in 20th century managerialism; and in many ways perhaps, even more so.

Indeed, making sure things *don’t* happen could be said to be the effective purpose of bureaucratic inflation; a mandelbrot set of layers of checkreigns, overseeing bodies, steering committees, verification processes, and validating criteria, all to ensure that nothing bad happens; which of course, serves to ensure nothing happens, tout court. The only people thinking ‘the process’ is how you are supposed to get things done are the losers and marks who don’t get the joke.

Complete with return of proper outlaws:
An outlaw was outside the law and had no recourse, he could be killed on sight with no legality involved.

This was the case well into the 19th century in America and goes back to the Romans.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/11/only-2-of-federal-criminal-defendants-go-to-trial-and-most-who-do-are-found-guilty/

Everything you need to know about the ideology at work behind it is right there in the name: penitentiary. The modern industrial prison system as we know it today was founded on the idea that the criminal is just as much an innocent victim as their victims themselves, and that it was possible to reshape the infinitely malleable human clay they are composed of into more SWPL form, thus serving their immortal souls which are no less in value to your own.

We will not dwell on that topic much more than to point a single finger at the 200+ years and counting of empirical failure, catastrophe, and calamity, as such men possessed of such notions dash their ships of state against the rocks of a recalcitrant universe.

In more civilized times of course, the dispensations of justice were swift, efficient, and zero overhead. Ranging in anything from social humiliations, like public stockades or canings, to indenture, to exile, to capital execution. It is not a coincidence that gnostic subversives were most keen on the elimination of both capital punishments, and also humiliating punishments that attack the subject’s social status, because these are also the most effective forms of justice against subversive elements just such as themselves.