More specificity would help. Cops, cop culture, incompetent and purposely harmful training, and the appalling nature of our criminal "justice" system is what ruins lives. Some other parts of government might be just as bad, but in other ways for other reasons.

Sorry but that's bullshit.

It's extremely rare for any part of government to have that as an intended purpose.

But it's extremely common, unfortunately, for people involved to be willing to accept that as a side effect in pursuing whatever their goals are - whether that's gaining funding for their police department, or raising political donations from the owners of a private prison, or keeping poor people away from their beautiful upper middle class neighbourhood, or environment-ruining chemical company, or... whatever.