I’ve always loved Mace Windu telling someone “your chances come in two sizes: slim and fat” in an old Star Wars Novell called Shatterpoint.

Because people in power need excuses to hit people they don’t like without having to pay weregild for it. That’s it, that’s the entire purpose of laws. The whole “protecting society” theory is a convenient smokescreen that we’ve all bought into through generations upon generations of Stockholm syndrome and the fact that we all also want to hit people and be justified in doing so from time to time.