The Wheels of Justice Turn Slowly

And its elevators are broke-down pieces of shit:

There are many longstanding, seemingly intractable shortcomings in the city’s family court system that might delay a parent in getting a child back from foster care: unprepared lawyers, overcrowded dockets and long waiting lists for drug treatment and mental health services.

But Bronx Family Court has added a new obstacle: broken elevators.

…Lines to use a working elevator can stretch around the corner. People sometimes wait for hours to get to hearings, which are held on the seventh and eighth floors. Frequently, hearings have to be postponed because clients and witnesses cannot get to them.

…The judges have less trouble getting upstairs because they use a bank of elevators reserved for court personnel. The public is not allowed on those, and may not use the stairs because of security concerns.

Because family court judges are constantly at risk for retribution because of their decisions, it's a reasonable policy to disallow the public from using the bank of elevators reserved for court personnel (despite my righteous populism admittedly eliciting instant indignation at the thought of judges too good to mingle with the hoi polloi), but the stairs being closed to everyone, for wont of a couple of security cameras, seems frustratingly short-sighted. Of course, I don't know the whole story.

What I do know from the article is that there is a "four-year modernization project" underway for the elevators—and, currently in year two, already one whole elevator has been fixed! Huzzah!

I also know that the Bronx Family Court is hardly the only public building in America is some stage of significant disrepair, resulting in the dysfunction of public services. We are failing to reinvest in ourselves, and it's beginning to show. (Crumble.)

Infrastructure schminfrastructure, we've been cavalierly sniffing for years, as if the country would never fall apart. Sure, we can have a war and tax cuts. We'll worry about levees and bridges and public upkeep later.

Later has arrived—and there's something depressingly poetic about Bush's grand plan to spread freedom and democracy all over the globe having left Americans waiting in breadlines for justice.

[H/T Angelos.]