Pubdate: Wed, 25 Jul 2012
Source: Weatherford Democrat (US TX)
Copyright: 2012, The Weatherford Democrat
Contact:  http://www.weatherforddemocrat.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2881
Author: John Stossel
Page: 4

AMERICA, THE LAW-CRAZED

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 ----ing 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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