There was a thread earlier that stated that over 30% of all U.S. Citizens become arrested at some point by the time they reach the age of 21 (It may have been 18). Over 1% of our population is in prison at any given moment, and per capitz, we have more than 5x the prison population of any other nation on the planet. Besides per capita, we have the largest NUMERICAL prison population on the planet.
The police state is in full swing. I by no means endorse drug use, but I’m going to point out that all of this criminalizing of all behavior is the round about way of gun control. Too many apathetic morons or ignorant touchy feely types thought it was a brilliant idea to hop on the “felons-have-no-rights” bandwagon. Unfortunately they failed to see that it was merely the “first they came for the felons, but I was not a felon” strategy. The average American commits THREE Federal felonies, PER DAY, completely unaware. A felony used to mean that the most heinous of crimes was committed, now it’s merely a money making racket. Everyone who is an adult is an unprosecuted felon, everyone.
Until everyone fights so that EVERYONE gets ALL of their God given rights, including felons not currently incarcerated/serving a sentence, no one will have them. They’ll continue to be erroded, mark my words.
(P.S. I’m not a felon, before anyone asks)
You’re an unprosecuted felon, and so am I....
Part of our prison population problem is freedom. But a larger part is the prison habitat. You know why Singapore is statistically one of the safest places (for crime) to be on the planet? An individual rarely commits a crime more than once.
If you break down the statistics by State, some magical things start to show up. When you break them down by ehtnicity, some more interesting things show up. When you start to study the cultural shift in America and the egregious influense urban and Latino cultures have had on youth in poverty along with our “no responsibility” and “no pride or honor” attitude (culturally speaking), it is no wonder we have lavish prisons fully populated with healthy happy repeat offenders.
Crime would drop like a rock if they changed the rules about prison overcrowding. If a prisoner had to be shot (executed) everytime a new prisoner was introduced to exceed the occupancy rating, how long before you think overcrowding would stop being an issue?
You take the number one worst offender or the leading prison gang member and you make him wear a yellow jump suit. It means he is the next to be executed when the court sends them another prisoner (regardless of how long he’s been in there). Save the jump suit. Wash it, leave the bullet holes, and give it to the next guy. This way, you kill a whole lot of birds with one stone.
Suddenly you end up with a prison full of cub scouts for fear of the yellow suit.
Just an idea......
(P.S. I’m not a felon, before anyone asks)
You just said everyone commits 3 felonies a day. Are you immobile?
If you (not just you) have served your time, you should have every constitutional right every other citizen enjoys, including but not limited to the right to keep and bear arms. If an ex con can't be trusted with a gun he should still be on the inside of a prison.
Trust me, there are plenty of laws and if the masters so desire, they will find one to make you a felon.
The sheer number and volume of laws is ridiculous, and you’re spot on about their purpose as a path to the police state, whether it was intentional or not. Lawmakers get paid to make laws, they get publicity for their re-election when they pass laws, and they get more croney jobs to hand out to their buddies with every law they have to enforce. So, it doesn’t even take a conspriratioral mindset to conclude that politicians will just keep making laws until everyone is a criminal if nobody stops them, and I think we’re already pass that point.
I’m not sure what we can do about the problem, since it would be much easier to pretty much wipe the slate clean and go back to a minimal set of laws than try to hack through the morass on the books already. The average complacent voter would let the media scare them off of supporting something that radical in a few heartbeats, so I don’t think it will happen. Even if we could get a drastic reduction, we’d also have to pass reform to discourage lawmakers making new laws unnecessarily, and that would be opposed by the entire political machine, of both parties.
It’s almost as if this is a problem inherent in political systems with lawmaking bodies, and the only solution is intermittent revolutions toppling the government and redrafting the law from scratch in order to reset the cycle.