From 3 to 4,500: What laws have you broken today? July 23, 2011 by Douglas French
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...
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