And it's not like our great deliberative bodies on Capitol Hill have carefully tailored these laws to ensure they serve the will of the people or even their own electoral interests. No, the statutory code sections often incorporate provisions and sanctions of administrative regulations developed by various regulatory agencies. And how many of these regs – I mean laws – are on the books? Nearly 10,000, the ABA thinks. It's lawmaking – criminal lawmaking – by bureaucrats.
Are we that much more evil than we were 200 years ago that we need this many laws to keep us off of each other? Or has the nanny state veered completely out of control – creating crimes where no evil existed, pinning blame where no harm was intended?
This trend toward what my colleagues here at the Heritage Foundation call "over-criminalization" – turning accidents into crimes – has dangerous implications. "Criminal law is a blunt tool," says Edwin Meese, former U.S. attorney general and White House counsel under President Reagan and director of the project. "It should be used for those acts that are truly criminal in nature, not as a means of enacting some bureaucrats' idea of a perfect world."
What happened to Edward Hanousek is absurd, and a danger to all of us. Laws are supposed to reflect our collective morality. All he did was go home at the end of a full day like most of us do. His conviction means we've criminalized negligence; that is, mistakes – traditionally thought to be the province of civil courts – are now crimes. Hanousek went to prison for failing to supervise an employee. Imagine how full the prisons could get if every supervisor were convicted when an employee makes a mistake.
As Paul Rosenzweig, senior legal research fellow in the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation reports: "... the criminal law has strayed far from its historical roots. Where once the criminal law was an exclusively moral undertaking, it now has expanded to the point that it is principally utilitarian in nature. In some instances, the law now makes criminal the failure to act in conformance with some imposed legal duty. In others, the law criminalizes conduct undertaken without any culpable intent. And many statutes punish those whose acts are wrongful only by virtue of legislative determination."
In short, over-criminalization trivializes real crimes, and makes criminals out of good citizens who err.
For more information on this subject, read Rosenzweig's paper on the Heritage Foundation's website.