Pick a Crime

A man trapped by a bureaucratic crime-prevention regime plots to commit an offense in order to be convicted, undergo mandatory corrective treatment, and gain the social and economic benefits reserved for treated ex-offenders. The narrative sketches a future society where technological detection and therapeutic interventions have nearly eliminated spontaneous crime and transformed convicted individuals into highly trusted employees. He recruits a woman to stage an attempted sexual assault to trigger legal action, but her training in a women's self-defense organization thwarts the plan. The story probes the perverse incentives and social control that arise when criminality is managed as medical correction rather than moral culpability.