(I know it's better to provide references to web pages and not books, but I don't have a web page that recreates that book on hand. Suggestions welcome.)
As I understand it, it's an estimate, not an actual figure. In order to perform such a survey, we'd have to sample people, record their entire daily activity, and determine how many crimes were committed. Determining how many crimes were committed would require an army of lawyers and private investigators... and that's the real point. As a normal citizen without an army of lawyers, you should have no confidence whatsoever that you are not committing crimes. If measured by "what could be used to convict you if the government wanted you out of the way" I'd guess 3 per day is a grotesque underestimate, at least one order of magnitude and I wouldn't bet much against 2.
I must admit I haven't ever thought about these numbers but it strikes me as insanely high. How can this be explained? Is it a feature of just America or is it reproducible in other countries as well?
>The Three Felonies A Day is an example of politics, not research, and has some rather motivated reasoning:
A "sceptics" link is hardly refutation. These sites attract professional "minor detail pickers" and "technically-correct" pedants, who more often than not miss the forest for the trees.
The message is not the exact number of felonies per time period, it's that people can have all kind of laws broken and given causes to be arrested without them knowing it.
Even if it's 1 felony per month or 1 per year it's still more than enough, and that's the point of "thee felonies a day".
>Only a little over 1/3rd are actually in prison for violent crime
On that chart, I was a little bit surprised to see the percentages for:
- category (g) (Homicide, Aggravated Assault, and Kidnapping Offenses) and
- category (l) (Sex Offenses)
...are as high as they are (although probably not that high in absolute numbers) for federal prison. I wonder where one could find a breakdown of the offenses? I'd have thought the only way to get a federal rape or murder sentence would be to commit the act on an FBI agent or other on-duty federal agent (Secret Service, US Marshals, Postman, others?). But I guess maybe soldiers who have been court-martialed end up in federal prison? That might explain most of those? And maybe kidnapping becomes a federal offense if you cross state lines?
If anything, this list indicates that the legal system in the US is in need of an overhaul. That officers would be swept up in the same net we all are, should not be unexpected. Given their daily proximity to law enforcement, having a higher number than the average population should not necessarily come as a surprise.
The way to tell if they really are more 'criminal' than the rest of the population would be to look at the felony rates of judges, para-legals, lawyers, court-recorders, bailiffs, wardens, people who live/work close to precincts, etc. If your physical proximity to an officer is related to the felony rate, then this should come fall out of the data.
In essence, based on your napkin-math, further research is very much required for the sake of public safety.
See the book and surrounding discussion of "three felonies a day". The Congressional Research Service cannot even produce an accurate count of how many federal crimes they are. Most estimates are over 100,000 different offenses. Add in state, county, municipal, further governmental subdivision crimes, etc. and it's totally impossible to know all the laws of the land.
They say ignorance of the law is no defense, but when the government can't even supply an accurate count of the number of the laws, maybe we should re-think that. We all commit a lot of crimes.
Data on number of actual prosecutions and convictions. you're arguing like someone who finds a bug in a piece of software and decries the entire computer industry as a conspiracy to part him from his money. Of course the law fails on occasion, look at how many lines of code are in it.
But the idea that everyone is breaking 5 or 6 federal laws every day and is at risk of financial ruin or indefinite incarceration at the whim of an indifferent judiciary (or as jlgreco asserts below, as part of an evil plot to render us legally helpless) is utter nonsense. You could, theoretically, break numerous laws in one day and place yourself in substantial legal jeopardy...but only via a sequence of unlikely coincidences. Stop taking the linkbait for fact: the reality is that young black men or ex-felons bear a far, far higher burden of extralegal discrimination than anyone does as the result of ham-fisted federal rulemaking.
This essay is from 1964, and no less relevant today: http://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-ame... I urge you to read it and consider the possibility that the federal government does not, in fact, exist for the purpose of making your life miserable.
> between 70 million and 100 million Americans, or as many as one in three American adults—have some type of criminal record. Many have been convicted of only minor offenses, such as misdemeanors—and many only have arrests that never led to a conviction.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00505UZ4G/
The author claims the average adults commits three Federal crimes a day.
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