When the State Breaks a Man by William Norman Grigg

When the State Breaks a Man by William Norman Grigg:

"When brought to bear against an isolated individual, the weight of this State apparatus will eventually destroy the victim. With each year, Ball's financial condition deteriorated and he became deeply mired in intractable despair.

By the time he ended his life on June 16, Ball was a 58-year-old Vietnam Era Army Veteran who had been unemployed for two years. Owing to the fact that he couldn't pay the amount of child support extorted from him, Ball was quite likely going to be sent to jail on the following morning.

His only consolation, the company of his children, was sadistically withheld from him. The unfathomably arrogant and completely unaccountable functionaries who did so are people who have learned how to monetize the misery of the innocent.

Ball's manifesto is a work of tortured eloquence. Although marred by occasional errors of diction, it is not the chaotic outpouring of a deranged personality. It is cogently organized and laden with impressive amounts of detailed research. The lucidity Ball displayed in explaining his decision to kill himself by the most painful method imaginable underscores not merely the depth of his despair but also of the entrenched corruption and viciousness of the people who had demolished his family."