If the current economic mess continues, those with a flimsy wallet and a weak moral compass might feel a tug towards Detroit, a city known for its higher-than-normal crime rate. Why? Because thanks to a proposed 20 percent budget cut to the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office, the city might stop prosecuting some “low-priority” crimes like small theft and breaking-and-entering.

“We can’t even cover our courtrooms anymore,” Prosecutor Kym Worthy told commissioners this weekend. Worthy expects to have to lay off 54 more employees under the new budget. She also anticipates the department will have to start sifting through arrests, deciding which crimes actually merit prosecution.

With an outlook like that, Police Chief Warren Evans’ new Project CRUSADERS anti-crime task force seems—we hate to say it—rather pointless.

Evans’s department is facing funding shortages, too. Some of the patrol cars don't have working computers to run license plates or names for outstanding warrants. Needless to say, this is a key tool for any police work in crime hotspots.

Without functioning computers in patrol cars, officers are forced to leave their patrols and head back to stations to file police reports. In a city that witnesses four to six shootings every day, the phrase “time is money” doesn’t even begin to describe how big this problem really is.

But shortages like these don’t just keep new prosecutions from taking place. They’re also keeping some inmates behind bars longer than they should be, because public defenders are too harried, underpaid and sometimes incompetent to properly pursue individual cases.

Lawyer Bob Slameka, for example, took on an appeal for an old client who had been in prison for 17 years on charges of rape and murder. Eddie Joe Lloyd, Slameka’s client, made national headlines in 2002 when DNA evidence surfaced that proved his innocence. Slameka, who continued to be assigned cases despite a history of repeated misconduct, held onto the case for two years without contacting his client before the appeal failed. (Lloyd’s case was adopted and finally won through intervention by a national advocacy group).

Lloyd’s story, however, can’t be simply accepted as proof that Slameka is a “bad lawyer” and that the county should be reprimanded for keeping him on board. Slameka, like the county’s other public defenders, has to take on 50 clients at a time to earn a living, and, beyond $50 for a single jail visit, he doesn’t get paid for the time he spends communicating with them or enough to cover trial costs.

Detroit’s public defenders haven’t seen a raise in over 30 years.

Congratulations, Detroit—your justice system is officially in worse shape than the nation’s healthcare.