Azkaban and wizard prisons

[Eric Oppen]

No: HPFGUIDX 25662

You know, it occurs to me that we've been so focussed on the Death Eaters
and their various and sundry nefarious deeds (WHAT?  You mean there might be
DEs who are unregistered Animagi?  You mean they'd...BREAK the LAW?  Me
golden idol is tarnished!) that we've forgotten that there might be a _lot_
of ways to get to Azkaban...and, judging from the way wizard "courts"
operate, *pause for giggling at calling those kangaroo courts
'courts'---there, that's better; I'm a lawyer's son and take trials
_seriously_* even being innocent's not much of a defense, if you're
unpopular enough.  OTOH, somebody who's popular and liked *cough cough OJ
cough Bagman cough* might be able to literally get away with murder.

(Come to it, I wonder if Ludo Bagman's "trial" was JKR's comment on the OJ
Simpson whoop-tee-doo?)

But I can think of a _lot_ of ways to be an unethical, nasty, corrupt
slimeball without ever joining up with Voldemort, if I were a wizard.  An
Animagus, just for starters, would be a very-hard-to-detect spy, either in
the corporate world or in the military, and could also possibly be a
nearly-unbeatable burglar.  Even if an Animagus couldn't carry stuff out,
one whose other form was, forex, an insect or rat could get into places no
human could, and once inside, lower the defenses so his cohorts could loot
the place to the bare walls.  If somebody walks in...hey, Memory Charm time!

Hit-wizard for a Muggle crime-boss would be another possibility, and if the
wizard was afraid of using the Killing Curse, good old Muggle methods,
combined with an Invisibility Cloak or some well-placed Memory Charms, would
work just fine.  Not to mention the wonderful possibilities in the fraud
field.  Any halfway-competent wizard could scam up a pretty good living off
the Muggles by just pretending to be a seer or fortune-teller.

For that matter, who in the world needs Avada Kedavra to kill?  Conjure up
some ropes, tie the victim up, levitate him or her up about fifty or sixty
feet, drop hard onto nearest hard surface or into deep water, and once dead,
dissolve the ropes, and the Muggle please-men'll have a jolly time figuring
out that murder was even done!

I bet that the Aurors were very, very busy keeping an eye on this sort of
shenanigans, even before Voldemort came around the mountain.