Jeff came across this article in the Economist. The quotes in this entry are all from that article.

THREE pickup trucks pulled up outside George Norris’s home in Spring, Texas. Six armed police in flak jackets jumped out. Thinking they must have come to the wrong place, Mr Norris opened his front door, and was startled to be shoved against a wall and frisked for weapons. He was forced into a chair for four hours while officers ransacked his house. They pulled out drawers, rifled through papers, dumped things on the floor and eventually loaded 37 boxes of Mr Norris’s possessions onto their pickups. They refused to tell him what he had done wrong. “It wasn’t fun, I can tell you that,” he recalls.

Six armed police officers that refused to tell him what he had done wrong. What did he do, you ask?

Mr Norris was 65 years old at the time, and a collector of orchids. He eventually discovered that he was suspected of smuggling the flowers into America, an offence under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.

Can you imagine being locked up and called an international smuggling King Pin over orchids? Yes, orchids! FLOWERS?! Might that be an overreaction? How are any one of us made safer by that? What exactly are we protected from?

When so many people are technically breaking the law, it is up to prosecutors to decide whom to pursue.

When so many people are technically breaking the law is right. I’d argue that nearly every single adult in America breaks laws on a daily basis, probably a good amount of children too. Don’t believe me? Try me. Tell me where you live and talk to me about your life. I bet you I can find at least five laws you’ve broken over the last week, alone.

Why have laws if we are going to enforce them arbitrarily? That sets up for corruption and gives government and the enforcers scary power, something I argue here. Need we be reminded police, judges and prosecutors are all just people. They are humans vulnerable, moody and flawed like each and every one of us?

“You’re (probably) a federal criminal,” declares Alex Kozinski, an appeals-court judge, in a provocative essay of that title. Making a false statement to a federal official is an offence. So is lying to someone who then repeats your lie to a federal official. Failing to prevent your employees from breaking regulations you have never heard of can be a crime. A boss got six months in prison because one of his workers accidentally broke a pipe, causing oil to spill into a river. “It didn’t matter that he had no reason to learn about the [Clean Water Act’s] labyrinth of regulations, since he was merely a railroad-construction supervisor,” laments Judge Kozinski.

What do you think? Might we be unnecessarily imprisoning people? What kind of offences do you think should be punishable by lock-up? Does it do anyone any good locking up NON-violent criminals?

Jim Felman, a defence lawyer in Tampa, Florida, says America is conducting “an experiment in imprisoning first-time non-violent offenders for periods of time previously reserved only for those who had killed someone”.

Non-violent offenders. Why are these people even locked up? I mean that. Really think about it, what good comes of it?

“The founders viewed the criminal sanction as a last resort, reserved for serious offences, clearly defined, so ordinary citizens would know whether they were violating the law. Yet over the last 40 years, an unholy alliance of big-business-hating liberals and tough-on-crime conservatives has made criminalisation the first line of attack—a way to demonstrate seriousness about the social problem of the month, whether it’s corporate scandals or e-mail spam,” writes Gene Healy, a libertarian scholar. “You can serve federal time for interstate transport of water hyacinths, trafficking in unlicensed dentures, or misappropriating the likeness of Woodsy Owl.”

Serving time over flowers. Flowers. FLOWERS.

Peace,
Kelly Halldorson