Pubdate: Sun, 29 Jul 2012
Source: Standard-Speaker (Hazleton, PA)
Copyright: 2012 Creators Syndicate
Contact:  http://www.standardspeaker.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1085
Author: John Stossel
Note: John Stossel is host of "Stossel" on the Fox Business Network. 
He's the author of "Give Me a Break" and of "Myth, Lies, and 
Downright Stupidity." Copyright 2012 By JFS Productions Inc.

TOO MANY LAWS AND PRISONERS

Over the past few decades, America has locked up more and more 
people. Our prison population has tripled. Now we jail a higher 
percentage of people than even the most repressive countries: China 
locks up 121 out of every 100,000 people; Russia 511. In America? 730.

"Never in the civilized world have so many been locked up for so 
little," The Economist says.

Yet we keep adding more laws and longer jail terms.

Lavrentiy Beria, head of Joseph Stalin's secret police in the old 
Soviet Union, supposedly said, "Show me the man, and I'll show you 
the crime." Stalin executed anyone he considered a threat, and it 
didn't take much to be considered a threat. Beria could always find 
some law the targeted person had broken. That's easy to do when there 
are tons of vague laws on the books. Stalin "legally" executed nearly 
a million people that way.

I'm not saying that America is like Stalin's Russia, but consider the 
federal laws we have. The rules that bind us now total more than 
160,000 pages. The Congressional Research Service said it was unable 
to count the number of crimes on the books. Yet last week the feds 
added or proposed another thousand pages. States and cities have 
thousands more. Have you read them all? Have our "representatives" 
read them all? You know the answer.

When there is a big crime, legislators quickly demand that felons be 
given longer jail sentences and "mandatory minimums" for repeat 
offenses. This wins votes but kills judicial discretion and crushes 
unlucky people.

In Iowa, a man with an old felony conviction found a bullet, put it 
on his dresser and forgot about it. A police officer, looking for 
something else, saw the bullet. Felons may not possess any 
ammunition, and this "crime" made the man a repeat offender. He's now 
serving a 15-year mandatory sentence for possession of ammunition. 
Really. The long sentence was appealed, but the U.S. Eighth Circuit 
Court of Appeals upheld it, saying its hands were tied by the 
mandatory minimum set in law.

Most of us won't be victimized by mandatory minimums or the countless 
ambiguities in today's laws, but if you are the kind of person 
America needs most  an inventor who creates something or someone who 
builds a business  there is a bigger chance that you'll fall victim 
to the incomprehensible maze. The laws burdening business and finance 
are bewildering  Dodd-Frank merely piled on. Even enterprises with 
big legal and accounting departments better watch out.

Then there's the so-called war on drugs  a war on people, actually. 
Lots of politicians admit that they used drugs in their youth  even 
presidents. Barack Obama wrote in his memoir, "Dreams From My 
Father": "Pot had helped ... ; maybe a little blow (cocaine) when you 
could afford it."

And, yet in office, these same politicians preside over an injustice 
system that jails a million Americans for doing what they did. Don't 
they see the hypocrisy? Give me a break.

Libertarian entertainer Penn Jillette has it right: "If Obama had 
been caught with the marijuana that he says he used and 'maybe a 
little blow' ... if he had been busted under his laws, he would have 
done hard  ing time ... time in federal prison, time for his 'weed' 
and 'a little blow,' he would not be president ... would not have 
gone to his fancy-ass college, he would not have sold books ... made 
millions of dollars. ... He would have been in prison, and it's not a 
goddamn joke."

I want my government to arrest real criminals  ones who violate our 
rights  and to lock them up so we'll be protected. But our 
politicians go way beyond that. Governments at all levels have long 
been in the business of forbidding conduct that violates no one's 
rights and piling on complex laws to govern conduct that might harm 
someone. And they keep passing more.

They have created a byzantine maze of criminal law that is so 
incomprehensible that even legal specialists don't agree on what the 
rules specify. Then ambitious prosecutors ruin lives enforcing those 
laws. The prosecutors and lawmakers say this is for our own good.

No, it's not.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom