Overcriminalization

Winston Churchill is often credited with the observation, “If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law.” The same goes for actual criminal penalties– felonies, even, with serious prison time– for things like expired occupational licensing, harvesting oysters the wrong way, or selling raw milk.

Texas can be tough on crime and put actual criminals away without overcriminalizing harmless day-to-day activity. For people to respect the laws, they have to understand them, and there simply can’t be so many layers upon layers of confusing, sporadically-enforced laws. Right now, Texas has something like 1,700 individual statutory criminal offenses, many of which are duplicative, contradictory, vague, antiquated, or just more appropriately applied to civil law (small fines, etc., rather than possible prison time). Every legislative session, hundreds more are proposed, many dozens are passed, but thankfully we’ve had a Governor in Rick Perry who has vetoed a lot of them over the years.

The other good news is that Texas has already improved in this regard, and we aren’t usually one of those states in which you hear about little kids being detained by police for drawing weapons with their crayons. And we’re not New York, which apparently just spent a year in an expensive sting operation against fake Yelp reviews. We seem to use more common sense in Texas than many states, which is good.

But if we want to be a free people, living in a free society, we have to be vigilant to treat real criminals like criminals, while using caution to lump anything and everything we might not like into the criminal justice system. I’d like to see the Texas law code scrubbed and simplified. I’d like to see many criminal offenses rolled back. And in the meantime, our law enforcement professionals will have more time and other resources to catch the actual bad guys, and our justice system will be more streamlined and efficient, allowing for serious threats to be neutralized more effectively.