I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and was curious about other people's thoughts on the issue. I call it the Criminal Justice Industrial Complex because that's what it's become. The entire thing from the passage of laws and who lobbies for what in exchange for what, the court systems, court appointed attorneys vs expensive private attorneys and plea bargaining, the nickel and diming costs of being on probation or having a vehicular alcohol tester or your phone monitored or ankle monitors, court mandated counseling, all of which the suspect or perpetrator has to pay for. Combine that with some people being entirely let off the hook for serious violent crimes while others get 18 months in prison for something that hurt no one and deprived no one of property. The whole thing is a monstrous house of cards built on graft, shady contracts, money making schemes, votes for bribes, keeping hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats and low tier government employees in a paying job and having to justify budgets, and on and on. We don't have a 'justice' system. We have a leviathan with several million moving parts that all need to get paid, designed to suck people in, grind them up, drain them for everything they're worth, and spit them out......but only if they're not "special" in some way. Be the right race, gender, religion, know the right people, have enough favors or clout and you can side step all of that. Clearly it doesn't work. We have people rotting in gulags for years for standing outside a building while others set buildings with people in them on fire and had their cases dropped entirely. What we have isn't working, and it sure as shit isn't justice.
For me, I would consider three things. And I'm more than willing to be convinced otherwise, I was just musing on it.
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All crimes must have an injured party. That is not to say a victim per se, just an actual injured party. Shoplifting might not have a victim, but someone is losing because of the theft. They are the injured party. A crime that has no injured party should not be a crime. And that does not include orders of deviation from the victim. No more of this "well if you commit A, that means it becomes more likely that other people might do B, which means that it could also become more likely that C could happen, therefore A is illegal". If you commit an act, and no person was harmed, no property was stolen or damaged, there is no injured party.
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You must have actually committed the crime, not just thought about it, intended to, wanted to, etc. Buying oregano from someone thinking it's weed shouldn't be a crime because the fact is, you bought oregano, not weed.
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You must have mens rea. The criminal must be aware, or should reasonably have been aware that what they were doing is a crime. No more having 300,000 statutes on the books and then saying "ignorance of the law is no excuse". If a guy meets a girl who tells him she's 21, they meet at a bar, the doorman checks her ID, the bartender checks her ID and asks if she's really 21, and the guy also unobtrusively checks her ID and all see that it looks real and says she's 21, if it turns out she's 17 the guy should not be guilty of anything. There are a ton of other examples of shit that could fall into this like catching the wrong kind of fish that happens to be 1.5cm shorter than the law 2 days out of season being a federal felony.
I understand that this means a ton of people who are probably bad people would not get locked up for small shit. But the flip side is that I would also increase the penalty for committing the few remaining crimes drastically. I would have life in prison or the death penalty for a lot more things. Much longer prison time for things like assault and battery or robbery. I'm a big proponent of letting people do more or less what they want, but come down like an ocean-going cargo ship full of bricks on the people who really do evil shit on purpose.
This board has, or at least had, a pretty wild mix of viewpoints from hard libertarians to natsocs and in between, so I'm curious what people's thoughts are on a total revamp of law, crime, and punishment in the US.
hoo boy this might be long.... i think i will limit it to four.
1 sandbag corpo's/wealthy in court procedings trials involving them get the following applyed to them, they get a court appointed attorney reasonably fresh from law shcool (cut off 2-4 years), they cannot instruct the attorny beyond the start of the suit and must have no contact with them outside of the courtroom in public or private, lastly 1 month time limit to provent bankruptcy as goal. reasoning for this is to a limit the effectiveness of lawfare tactics and b an attempt to stop larger groups from just moneybaging their way to victory knowing they can just bankrupt their target with their vast resources.
2 copyright reform, throw all of the god damn disney crap into the nearst incenorator where it belongs. 70 plus years after the authors death is absurd it should be a flat 25, also a use it or loose it clause added to all copyrighted works and patents no more of this ea style hoovering up ip/patents and then squatting on it that harms the creative ecosystem and enable patent trolling fail this it goes public domain... speaking of harm scuttle the dmca while your at it.
3 term limits, judges should be rotated out every year (unless they are soctus) with a max of 3 terms this is an attempt to limit judical corruption with a revolving door aproach it will make bribery impractical.
4 jury improvments, the jury should be required to take, at state expense. a civics remedial course with case law examples included... said course must promently feature the concept of jury nullification as well. the jurior position also must pay the person stuck in it their standard hourly wage at time and a half if apllicable. if not they will recive min wage rates non taxable in both cases. this is an attempt to prevent filtering out juriors who know of jury nullification as well as an attempt to make it less likely for people to skip jury duty if selected.
none of these are great really but thats where i would start.
One idea I like is progressive copyright fees.
If you want to copyright a work, you pay $1 to the national copyright registry and submit a copy of the work for comparison purposes.
Each year you renew, the cost doubles. After ten years, this is only around $500, which is reasonable if you're making modest profit.
By year 25, it's around $16 million, and only worthwhile for the biggest properties.
This severely discourages copyright squatting and creates a self-financing regulatory body which can actually produce what is copywritten for comparison in lawsuits.
great idea. and where its self regulating like that its corruption resistant.