You don't need hideous crimes to make life unbereable, all that's needed is knowledge that blatant theft or fraud will not be prosecuted by the state because it's "not worth the time".General Zod wrote: Which brings me back to the point of "so what"? If I were to follow your logic to its natural conclusion any number of hideous crimes aren't worth prosecuting.
It means people could rip you off in the most blatant ways, like not paying bills, witholding pay from workers, outright stealing, etc.
Basic interactions we engage in every day work on the presumption of honesty from the people we deal with ; Part of our capability to extend this presumption to strangers is that, should the stranger blatantly screw us over, we can go to the courts and expect a reasonable outcome. Same goes for a stranger who might otherwise feel the inclination to just not pay the bill you issued, who can be reasonably certain something so blatant will get him punished.
So, what happens if the courts decide things below a certain treshold are not worth the time to deal with? How would you like to have to live in a place where you have to be guarded, all the time, against people who would blatantly rip you off and then go "what'cha gonna do about it?" to your face? You don't even need for them to be a majority, just a statistically significant percentage. The inevitable consequence of that state of affairs is, of course, rampant emergence of vigilante justice and re-emergence of tribal and clan social relations, where members of a group treat all outsiders like enemies unless proven otherwise.
So, yeah ,it is certainly worth it to prosecute petty crimes against property if the victim feels the need for it. And it is definitely worth it to make examples of people who feel they can just throw court summons in the trash without a word of explanation (really, that girl could have recovered even from that, had she contacted the court and explained why she can't attend), no matter the reason for the summons.
