It works, right?  Isn’t that good enough?

“The conspiracy was real; the guns were real; the defendants’ intent to use them to violently rob a cocaine stash house was real; and the defendants’ criminal histories were real,” the federal prosecutors argued in their brief. The supposed stock of cocaine had to be set high, they said, to make the proposal credible.

How, anyone of good conscience must ask, can we feel badly for such defendants?  Well, the problem arises from the fact that these aren’t defendants caught engaging in crimes.  Rather, these are people who live and hang in poor neighborhoods, where the government sends its friends to troll for the miserable, the pathetic, the losers who might be enticed by visions of big money and an end to their misery.

And unsurprisingly, it doesn’t happen in white neighborhoods.

“Stash-house stings” . . .  have sent more than 1,000 of the country’s most “violent, hardened criminals” to prison, sometimes for terms of decades, according to the bureau, which has made a specialty of the ruses. The agency says it has conducted about 365 of these stings over the last decade, removing from the streets career criminals who are “willing to kill and be killed,” with less risk to agents and neighbors than raids on real stash houses.

They get to be called “violent, hardened criminals” because they have prior criminal histories. Or as Captain Renault might call them, “the usual suspects.”  They’re easy pickin’s with the right bait, and nobody has better bait than the feds.  Except the bait is imaginary, the crime illusory, though the punishment is very real.

But for all the government’s hyperbole, judges are getting tired of sentencing poor people for imaginary crimes.

Judge Otis D. Wright II of Federal District Court described the bureau in his March decision as “trawling for crooks in seedy, poverty-ridden areas — all without an iota of suspicion that any particular person has committed similar conduct in the past.”

A second judge in Los Angeles dismissed similar charges in May. The federal appeals court in Chicago last week mandated a new trial to allow evidence of possible entrapment. Other judges have demanded data from the bureau to help them explore whether the stings, which nearly always land black or Hispanic defendants, involve illegal racial targeting.

In May, also in Los Angeles, Judge Manuel L. Real of Federal District Court dismissed charges against three other men, saying the government “steers too close to tyranny.” He said that the agents initially knew little about the defendants except that “they were from a poor neighborhood and minorities.” The government has appealed.

Upon realizing the government’s scheme, to lure minorities from poor neighborhoods into committing crimes of such spectacular ease and return, entrapment immediately comes to mind.  But the entrapment defense has two prongs; not only must the government create the opportunity to engage in the crime, but the defendant must not be predisposed to commit it.  The government must “induce” the target to commit a crime he wouldn’t otherwise commit.  That’s why they target people with prior criminal history.  If he was a bad dude before, he’s predisposed to being a bad dude again.

But the defense tact has come to incorporate not only the troubling question of entrapment, but racial profiling and selective prosecution:

The goal, defense lawyers say, is to build a case that the bureau engages in racial profiling and selective prosecution, which could result in the dismissal of charges.

Defense lawyers in the Chicago cases calculated that the 25 known stash-house stings in that judicial district since 2006 involved 75 black, 16 Latino and six white defendants. The 13 cases since 2010 involved 45 black defendants, 14 Latinos and one white person.

The government, of course, replies that they’re just going after the people who would commit such crimes, even if before they actually do so.

Ginger L. Colbrun, a spokeswoman for the bureau, strongly denied racial targeting. The agency, she said, works with local partners “to identify the areas and people that are most violent in a community.”

There are other complaints about the allocation of law enforcement resources. Why create imaginary crimes when there are real crimes happening?

“Is this where we want to put our law enforcement resources — giving people the opportunity to commit a crime and then putting them in prison for decades?” asked Katharine Tinto, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York.

Ms. Colbrun, the bureau spokeswoman, said: “Targets of these investigations are only pursued if they show a predisposition to commit these acts and a propensity for violence.”

Notwithstanding the prawfs question, the answer may well be, “sure, you bet.”  After all, if they are as bad as the government says they are, what’s wrong with the government going after them proactiviely?  Why wait until they commit the crimes under uncontrolled circumstances when we can get them without putting anyone at risk?

Don’t you care about the children?

Except the argument begs the primary issue: “stash house stings” are most effective with small potatoes, guys who would never in their wildest dreams be anywhere near kilos of drugs and big money.  It preys on the most pathetic, least aware, most miserable, because they are the ones most inclined to be enticed by the government holding out the brass ring of a crime the likes of which they would never accomplish on their own.

Getting these little leaguers out of the hood is one thing. Sentencing them to life plus cancer for a crime they would never have dreamed of on their own is another.  It’s not just that the government only goes fishing for guppies in the ghetto, or that it would rather allocate its resources to imaginary crimes than the real ones it sucks at solving, but that it reflects the government’s obsession with finding new ways to ruin lives rather than help them.

So they sent “more than 1,000 of the country’s most ‘violent, hardened criminals’ to prison”?  If you define that as the guy who sold a dime bag on the corner, then yeah, this is a huge success. Feel safer yet?