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.
Some questions for you I would like some clarification on:
Regarding point 1, how would you handle driving while heavily intoxicated? Would you not consider that a crime until they have already hurt someone?
Regarding point 2 and 3, where do you draw the line? If someone didn't know murder was illegal and killed someone would that be a crime? If they killed someone without intending to by doing something they didn't know was illegal is that still a crime?
I am aware these seem like rather extreme and absurd examples but it illustrates what i feel is missing in your idea. They sound great but are a bit too vague and lead to some rather bizzare edge cases where common sense and morality would dictate that a criminal wrong was commited but perhaps it somehow isn't under your rule of law, depending on where you draw the distinction of what constitutes a crime.
I would argue for all three that we were promised a free country, not a particularly safe one. For drunk driving, if they didn't damage any property or hurt anyone, it wouldn't be a crime. Now the penalty for damaging property if drunk driving might be more than a decade in prison first offense, if you injure or kill somebody, death penalty. If you accept the premise that you can criminalize an action for everyone because for some smaller subset of everyone, some of those people might do something which then might lead to something else which then might lead to someone being harmed opens too dangerous of a can of worms. That's one of the chief ways we got so many superfluous laws in the first place. Once the state was allowed to take the authority to pass laws on everyone for their own "protection" because something bad might happen with some of them, we gave the state the authority to pretty much pass any law they want as long as they can come up with some explanation for how they could be preventing some bad thing that is at least theoretically possible. I simply don't recognize their authority to do so at all. If it makes the country a little less safe but a lot more free, I'm okay with it.
For ignorance of crime, I would keep in that it's not an excuse bit put a hard cap on the actual number pf laws (at least for felonies, civil is different). Misdemeanors and bylaws should have a warning system where warnings are tracked and cops can see what you've been told when the check your file, but first time offenses habitually get warnings so long as you promise not to do it again.