In America there are people who have gone to prison for selling orchids without the proper permits.
The premise of the article is correct. We use incarceration as punishment for a great many of non-violent offenses and at great cost.
“We use incarceration as punishment for a great many of non-violent offenses and at great cost.”
I agree. There’s a lot of low level crime/violations that we should just slap a fine and community service time and we’d save a whole lot of money.
The premise of the article is correct. We use incarceration as punishment for a great many of non-violent offenses and at great cost.
We have far too many unnecessary and stupid laws. It's almost impossible for the average American to go about his or her day without breaking a multitude of them. Combine that with the advent of computers where a conviction for spitting bubble gum on the sidewalk 25 years ago can cost you a job and we make a good portion of our population unemployable because they ran afoul of some BS law when they were younger.
It's not a popular opinion on a website of conservatives where "lock em all up" is a popular stance, but I'll argue that as a nation that claims to be at the forefront of freedom in the world we lock up entirely too many people for stupid crap. Once you incarcerate someone you basically ensure they become a hardened criminal even if they weren't going in.
I wish the country would take the same stance with criminal law that President Trump took with federal regulations when he went into office. Before you put a new law on the books you have to remove several others. We're over-regulated, over-policed, and over-lawed. We need to scrap about 90% of the criminal code, just because something is dumb it doesn't mean it should be illegal.