Laws were made to protect people. There is no argument with that. But harsh penalties for petty crimes is cause for argument, say judges, attorneys and concerned citizens. The Economist reports that one in every one hundred people in the US is locked up. The number of people under “correctional supervision” is a staggering one in thirty-one.
A 65 year old orchid lover and seller whose business averaged around $20,00 a year was sentenced, as a “Kingpin” to 17 months in prison for smuggling orchids, all because his suppliers were not meticulous in their paperwork. His crime…making a false claim to the federal government, punishable by up to five years.
A person can get as much time for selling pills as they can for committing rape. Selling drugs cut mostly with flour, quinine or other non-narcotic fillers? According to the Economist, 10 grams of opiates that are mixed in with 190 grams of flour will get you the same 15 years as if the drug package contained 200 grams of pure dope. If the arrestee lives in a “three-strikes’’ state, getting caught with a marijuana joint could mean life in prison.
Appeals-court judge Alex Kozinski wrote an essay entitled You’re (Probably) a Federal Criminal. Kozinski writes that even if you are unaware a law exists, or if unbeknownst to you an employee breaks a law, you, too, can become a convicted felon. Lying to a federal official is a crime, and if you tell that lie to someone who repeats it to a federal official you get a double whammy.
A libertarian scholar listed crimes that are almost laugh-out-loud funny, if there wasn’t a prison sentence attached to them. Gene Healy recounts that, “You can do time for interstate transport of water hyacinths, trafficking in unlicensed dentures, or misappropriating the likeness of Woodsy Owl.” With more than 4,000 federal crimes, and the large number of regulations that go with them, even the Congressional Research Service couldn’t keep count of them all. And although prosecutors try to put away violent criminals, the laws that they are obliged to uphold force them to put millions of non-violent offenders away for petty, sometimes silly, crimes.
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