“If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime” only makes sense in a world where laws are enforced fairly, people are prosecuted based on evidence rather than political gain, and judges apply sentencing guidelines without bias. That world does not exist. The American criminal legal system is not a neutral referee. Police discretion determines who gets arrested and who doesn’t based on factors that include zip code and race — not just conduct. Prosecutors prioritize conviction rates over truth and use inflated charges and plea leverage to coerce outcomes. Judges bring personal bias and inconsistency to sentencing. A phrase that treats the result of all of that as a fair reflection of individual conduct is not describing reality. It is describing a comfortable fiction — and insisting on it in the face of everything the documented record shows makes a person sound like they have not been paying attention.
There is one phrase, without fail, that makes me absolutely cringe every time I hear it.
From the armchair judges on social media to commentators who’ve never been closer to the legal system than a Law & Order rerun or Nancy Grace in her screeching, ear-splitting glory — it’s the same verbal excrement I would never be sad to never hear again:
“If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.”
I think these people believe it sounds tough, or they’re genuinely misguided into thinking it sounds fair. Kind of like “whoever smelt it, dealt it.” But let me be Crystal Pepsi clear: that phrase only makes sense in a world where laws are enforced fairly, people are prosecuted based on evidence rather than political gain, and judges apply sentencing guidelines without bias.
We do not live in that world.
The System Is Not Fair. It’s Rigged.
The criminal legal system isn’t a neutral referee. It’s a battlefield where the deck is stacked from the start. Here is what the documented record actually shows.
1. Police Don’t Just “Enforce the Law”
Police discretion plays a significant role in who gets arrested and who doesn’t. Entire neighborhoods are over-policed while others get a blind eye. Over-policed communities produce more arrests not because more crime occurs there, but because more officers are deployed with the assumption that that’s where the crime is — while identical conduct in wealthier neighborhoods goes unnoticed and unprosecuted.
Whether a person is stopped, searched, or charged can come down to their zip code, their race, or whether a cop is having a bad day. And the idea that police will only arrest someone who has actually done something wrong is not supported by the record. Cops can and often do lie. They withhold body camera footage. They falsely arrest people for exercising their constitutional rights and act as muscle for judges who can’t stand being questioned.
Prosecutors and police coach witnesses. In a case out of Barry County, Michigan, officers coerced parents into handing over their minor children’s cell phones on cases where they had zero leads — potentially opening those families up to criminal charges for content entirely unrelated to the investigation.
Across Michigan, Resisting and Obstructing charges are deployed by police and prosecutors so broadly that simply disagreeing with a law enforcement officer can constitute the offense. The statute is too broadly written to function as a narrowly targeted law enforcement tool. It functions instead as a catch-all charge available whenever an officer decides that a person’s conduct — including the exercise of constitutional rights — is inconvenient. That is not a law enforcement tool. That is a tool for the suppression of dissent at the individual encounter level.
2. Prosecutors Play to Win — Not to Find the Truth
The job of a prosecutor is supposed to be to seek justice. But in practice, many are more focused on securing convictions to build careers — and they use threats, inflated charges, and plea leverage to force people, especially poor people, to take deals for things they didn’t do rather than risk a worse outcome at trial.
If a person thinks justice is a fair fight in court, they have never watched a public defender with two hundred cases go up against a fully staffed prosecutor’s office with investigative resources and institutional knowledge. The resource asymmetry is not an accident of funding. It is a structural feature of a system that was built to produce outcomes, not to produce truth.
Approximately 97% of federal convictions and roughly 94% of state convictions are the result of guilty pleas rather than trials. Most of those pleas are not entered because the defendant is conclusively guilty and chose to accept responsibility. Many are entered because the plea offer is better than the risk of trial, the defendant cannot afford to wait in pretrial detention, and the public defender does not have time to mount an adequate defense. “If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime” applied to a plea conviction is not describing justice. It is describing the outcome of a pressure calculation made under conditions of profound resource inequality.
3. Judges Are Not Impartial
The assumption that judges are neutral arbiters of law and fact is not supported by the documented record. Judges come to the bench with political agendas, personal vendettas, and unconscious biases — and those factors shape the outcomes of cases in ways the phrase “if you can’t do the time” completely ignores.
They routinely approve shoddy warrants, ignore prosecutorial misconduct, and impose wildly inconsistent sentences based on factors including race, socioeconomic status, and the amount of media attention a case attracts. Judge Kirsten Nielsen Hartig of the 52nd District Court in Troy was found “unsafe to practice” by a psychological evaluation ordered by the Judicial Tenure Commission — and continued to preside over cases. In what other profession can a person be found “unsafe to practice” and still show up to work, collect a pension, and exercise unchecked power over other people’s lives?
And the sentencing record in Barry County, Michigan, documents something that should end the “if you can’t do the time” conversation permanently: a person with resources sentenced to 6 months in jail, and a person who needed a public defender sentenced to 15 years in prison — for the same offense, before the same judge. Those public defenders, by the way, are not independent advocates. They are contracted and paid by the county whose prosecutors they are supposed to challenge.
What time? Whose time? Why does one person’s time matter more if they have money? How much would your time be worth?
“Doing the Crime” Doesn’t Mean You Deserve the Time
States pay for prosecution on three sides simultaneously: cops, courts, and prosecutors. The deck is not only stacked — it is funded to be stacked. Even if someone did commit a crime, that does not automatically justify what the system does next.
Should a person caught with cannabis really lose their children permanently? Should someone stealing food to feed their family get buried under mandatory minimums? Should a teenager making one bad decision be branded a felon for life? The idea that punishment should be automatic and merciless is not justice. It is retribution dressed up as morality — and it ignores the fact that the system does not treat everyone the same when it delivers that retribution.
What We Should Say Instead
Stop repeating slogans and start asking questions. Why are certain communities targeted more than others? Why are judges allowed to exceed sentencing guidelines without consequences? Why does the system spend more on jails than on schools, housing, or mental health care?
Instead of “if you can’t do the time,” try this: “If you can’t guarantee justice, stop pretending this is about fairness.”
Final Thoughts
Anyone who invokes “if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime” is telling on themselves. They are either out of touch, privileged or powerful enough to never have had to worry about it, or willfully ignorant of the actual machinery of American injustice. That phrase is a shield of ignorance — a way of disassociating from what the system actually does to people, of avoiding the discomfort of acknowledging how broken it is.
Justice isn’t a bumper sticker. It’s something this country is failing spectacularly at — and it needs to change.
Sources and Prior Clutch Coverage
Rita Williams, “If You Can’t Do the Time” Is a Myth: Why the Criminal Justice System Isn’t Fair, Clutch Justice (June 8, 2025), https://clutchjustice.com/2025/06/08/if-you-cant-do-the-time-criminal-justice-myth/.
Williams, R. (2025, June 8). “If you can’t do the time” is a myth: Why the criminal justice system isn’t fair. Clutch Justice. https://clutchjustice.com/2025/06/08/if-you-cant-do-the-time-criminal-justice-myth/
Williams, Rita. “‘If You Can’t Do the Time’ Is a Myth: Why the Criminal Justice System Isn’t Fair.” Clutch Justice, 8 June 2025, clutchjustice.com/2025/06/08/if-you-cant-do-the-time-criminal-justice-myth/.
Williams, Rita. “‘If You Can’t Do the Time’ Is a Myth: Why the Criminal Justice System Isn’t Fair.” Clutch Justice, June 8, 2025. https://clutchjustice.com/2025/06/08/if-you-cant-do-the-time-criminal-justice-myth/.
About the Author
Rita Williams
Rita Williams is a Michigan-based judicial oversight analyst and founder of Clutch Justice, an investigative platform focused on court system accountability, sentencing integrity, and SCAO policy. Her work examines how courts, policies, and administrative systems operate in practice, with a focus on where process breaks down and harm is created. Drawing on lived experience and systems-level analysis, she writes to make legal structures more readable, expose institutional gaps, and advocate for reforms grounded in both evidence and human impact. Rita’s writing bridges legal analysis, institutional critique, and public education, with a consistent focus on accountability without losing sight of the people most affected by the justice system.
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