From 3 to 4,500: What laws have you broken today?
http://archive.mises.org/17835/from-3-to-4500-what-laws-have-you-broken-today/

The U.S. Constitution mentions three federal crimes by citizens: treason, piracy and counterfeiting. Today, there are an estimated 4,500 crimes in federal statutes, write Gary Fields and John R. Emshwiller for the Wall Street Journal.

Clarence Darrow anticipated the prison nation that America is today a hundred years ago in his book Resist Not Evil. All areas of life have become part of the penal code, with an army of people operating as police, legislators, and the court system to enforce these laws through force and violence. But even Darrow wouldn’t have dreamed that the unauthorized use of the Smokey Bear image, or of the slogan “Give a Hoot, Don’t Pollute” can land a person in federal prison.

Fields and Emshwiller’s frightening article tells about a father and son chased by the Feds for unknowingly digging on federal ground for arrowheads. “The Andersons are two of the hundreds of thousands of Americans to be charged and convicted in recent decades under federal criminal laws—as opposed to state or local laws—as the federal justice system has dramatically expanded its authority and reach.”

The Amercian Bar Association can’t even tally up the federal offenses exactly but believe the number exceeds 3,000. The ABA’s report said “the amount of individual citizen behavior now potentially subject to federal criminal control has increased in astonishing proportions in the last few decades.”

A Justice spokeswoman told the WSJ, that there was no quantifiable number. “Criminal statutes are sprinkled throughout some 27,000 pages of the federal code,” write Fields and Emshwiller.

These crimes of the state’s making are sending 83,000 people a year to federal prison. While the US population has grown 36% in the past three decades, three times more people are going to prison, with immigration and drug violations making up over 60% of the offenses in 2010. The federal prison population has grown eight fold during this period.

Of course much of the public cheers on the increasing prison state.

Roscoe Howard, the former U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, argues that the system “isn’t broken.” Congress, he says, took its cue over the decades from a public less tolerant of certain behaviors. Current law provides a range of options to protect society, he says. “It would be horrible if they started repealing laws and taking those options away.”

One wonders if Howard believes 77-year-old race-car legend Bobby Unser deserves to have a criminal record “for accidentally driving a snowmobile onto protected federal land, violating the Wilderness Act, while lost in a snowstorm.” Or whether a Pennsylvania woman who violated a 1998 federal chemical-weapons law tied to an international arms-control treaty should spend six years in prison. The woman spread some chemicals that burned her husband’s paramour on the thumb.

The woman has challenged the law’s constitutionality and the Supreme Court is sympathetic.

During oral arguments in the case, Justice Samuel Alito expressed concern about the law’s “breadth” by laying out a hypothetical example. Simply pouring a bottle of vinegar into a bowl to kill someone’s goldfish, Justice Alito said, could be “potentially punishable by life imprisonment.”

And this is today’s justice system? Darrow wrote in 1902,

the state furnishes no machinery for arriving at justice. [It] has no way of arriving at the facts. If the state pretends to administer justice this should be its highest concern. It should not be interested in convicting men or punishing crime, but administering justice between men. It is obvious to the most casual observer that the state furnishes no machinery to accomplish this result.



If you don't have enough Criminals,create a few!
Guilty Men are much easier led than innocent ones!

I'm sorry I kilt ya'lls thread.

Not really!



There would be all other reasons women should be allowed kids in prison.
Child rapists. They could rape their own.

Murderesses

Not to mention the cost of providing segregation from other inmates that could harm the kid.

My vote would go to giving, temporarily, the kid to responsible folks if she's in for a non-violent or non-drug related crime.

Violent crime, adopt the kid out.

Drug related, mandatory 2 to 3 years clean then 5 years random testing.

Being a parent is not a right but a privelege. If you get yourself locked up you loose your priveleges.

Children are not a book to be lent around like they can just be parked anywhere convienent until a parent works out their problems and gets a do over.

Children, even really young ones, have serious bonding issues when they get musical caregivers. Then the concept of having or being a parent gets muddled and you have innergeerational failure all too often. I have seen that even in senior abuse.

While it sounded kind of shocking how it was originally stated the fact that women often are child molesters/abusers/murderers is a serious risk. Anyone who thinks that an infant or child could not end up a hostage in a prison riot is kidding themself.

I have thought about this awhile and I can not imagine asking my child to ever come to prison and see me if wrongly convicted or not. I did not even want mine to have to endure visiting in a hospital setting and only rarely did that.

I agree.
If the kid was a first priority, the mother wouldn't have gotten herself in the position of being locked up.

Now, that will disclude women who killed defending themselves or their kids.

Or, wasting a predator in action against any child.

Also would exclude a mother bashing in the skull of someone smoking weed in their kids presence.

Those three types should be given medals instead of prison terms.

I bet if sterilization for criminals was mandatory, there would be less crime.

Why should society help or excuse antisocial behavior? Do you think that these women/men and their future criminal offspring give a $hit about the victims of their crimes?