News Release

November 22, 2004

Media Contact: (202) 789-5200

Is everything a crime these days?
New book deplores "the criminalization of almost everything"

Are we making a federal case out of everything these days? In a new Cato Institute book, legal scholars warn that the increasing use of criminal penalties and the constant creation of new federal crimes are making ordinary citizens vulnerable to arrest and imprisonment for behavior that no sensible person would consider a crime.

As editor Gene Healy explains in Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything published this month by the Cato Institute, the criminal law was once society's last line of defense, reserved for behavior that everyone recognized as wrong. But it's fast becoming Congress's first line of attack -- just another way for legislators to show they're serious about the social problem of the month, whether it's corporate scandals or e-mail spam.

While violent crime often goes unpunished, Congress continues to add new trivial offenses to the federal criminal code. These additions have significant costs, in terms of wasted resources and lost liberties.

Citing scores of disturbing cases, Go Directly to Jail condemns three particular trends:

• Overcriminalization -- the use of the criminal law to punish behavior that used to be handled with civil lawsuits or fines and to outlaw behavior that's simply none of the government's business. As the book's contributors note, businesspeople have gone to jail under federal wetlands regulation for putting clean dirt on dry land. Others have been sentenced to long prison terms for packaging lobster tails in plastic bags rather than cardboard boxes or for failing to understand the thousands of pages of complex regulations governing Medicare.
• Federalization -- the creation of federal laws for crimes already covered by state laws. There are only three federal crimes in the U.S. Constitution. But today there are more than 4,000 federal crimes on the statute books and thousands more buried in the Code of Federal Regulations. Church arson, drive-by shootings, and the possession of recreational drugs are but a few commonplace examples.
• Excessive criminal punishments -- the use of heavy-handed criminal law enforcement tactics, such as handcuffing and jail time, against people guilty of minor offenses and, in some cases, people who aren't guilty of crimes at all. Case in point: a 12-year-old girl was arrested and handcuffed for eating french fries in a Metro station in Washington, D.C.

The contributors also discuss mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines and habitual offender statutes, which curtail the discretionary power of the judiciary in individual cases and have dramatically increased the number of prisoners serving time for nonviolent offenses. Go Directly to Jail proposes reforms that can help rein in a criminal justice system at war with fairness and common sense.

About the Editor
Gene Healy is senior editor at the Cato Institute. He holds a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School and is a member of the Virginia and District of Columbia bars. His articles have been published in the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere. He resides in Washington, D.C.

Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything
Edited by Gene Healy
Retail price: $17.95 cloth, 192 pages
ISBN: 1-930865-63-5
Publication date: November 22, 2004

Since 1992 the Cato Institute's books have been distributed to the trade by the National Book Network (www.nbnbooks.com).