Have you heard about the latest police"initiative"?
Apparently there are not enough criminals falling into court on their own to keep the system happy. The punishment sector of society requires ever more public offenders to provide a base for the growth in the share of our national budget dedicated to the penal systems in all 50 states. When the supply of ready offenders falls short, or, in other words, when crime rates fall, state legislators simply make more laws making more things illegal to fill the gap.
Take California's penal system for example. It is California's largest single budget item, larger even than their gigantic health and welfare department and far larger than their entire educational or human services system. The funny thing about this major budget item is it is sacrosanct and gets the full support and backing of both the public and organized crime. When Gov. Schwarzenegger tried to scale the system back to something that made sense given today's tight budget constraints he got slapped down hard. It seems everybody is happy with the numbers of cops and robbers in the system today. It’s just that no one wants to pay for them.
So the legislatures around the country pony up to support an obese bureaucracy dedicated to putting more and more people in jail. We could spend our money trying to correct people's behavior, or by trying to eliminate the reason people find themselves caught up in the system in the first place. NO WAY! In this country we prefer to cage each other like animals rather than to rehabilitate our social misfits.
Since nothing major has occurred in our country in the last decade to keep people frightened and willing to pay up for more security, police departments are under pressure to justify their bloated budgets. They are rising to the challenge in a unique and unusual way. Police departments are creating special task forces who move into the digital world as cyber spies and digital sport hunters. These specialized hunters are setting traps all over the web. However their main focus is in their favorite area of crime investigation, the sexual realm since sex crimes make the best headlines.
What they now do is they set up phony links offering lurid tag lines. These come ons are designed to seduce the unsuspecting public into incriminating themselves by following these phony links. For example, they may attempt to lure a child sexual predator into giving himself away by following a suggestive thread into a private chat room. The next morning the proud owner of that IP address gets a 6 AM cyber SWAT, military style invasion guaranteed to put the rest of his life in a tailspin.
Mind you, this person may have been merely curious, may have been doing research, or may have had dozens of other reasons to follow a lurid link. Heck the person may have even clicked on the link by mistake! This person may have had no history of child sexual abuse throughout his entire life and is now about to be convicted by the press and in the court of public opinion as a child molester. I do not know how anyone could ever expect to recover from public exposure to charges like this. Regardless of guilt or innocence anyone accused of a crime of this nature is ruined for life.
So is this a good idea America? Should we send our excessive police forces forging out into the cyberspace world to create a whole new class of criminal? Should we give up any notion of internet privacy in favor of a dubious good? Is setting traps for Internet users even a morally good, let alone the best, way to manage our resources? Are we now capable of determining when thought crimes are being committed, and should we start putting people in jail for what they may be thinking whether or not they have even done anything wrong? Are we ready to start putting people in jail for what they have looked at online?
We’d better get ready to build a whole bunch more jails since anybody with an iPod or cell phone is a potential criminal in a heartbeat.
Is this America's concept of freedom going forward?
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