Legal Crimes of the Criminal Justice System

By Opal Dockery

A study composed of eight books, definining legal crimes within the Criminal Justice System. Identifying victimless crimes, as well as crimes that are actually committed against others, this study includes extensive research on laws pertaining to drugs, prostitution, gambling, pornography, legal drugs, childhood obesity, human trafficking, and modern day slavery within the Criminal Justice system.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Sep 29, 2011
• ISBN: 9781312632233

Book preview

Legal Crimes of the Criminal Justice System

Legal Crimes Of The Criminal Justice System

LEGAL CRIMES

OF THE

CRIMINAL JUSTICE

SYSTEM

By

OPAL DOCKERY

Legal Crimes of the Criminal Justice System

By Opal Dockery

Copyright @ 2010 by Opal Dockery

Second Printing Ebook Edition 2014

Dixie Publishing Company

P.O. Box 364

Lamar, Missouri 64759

ISBN: 978-1-312-63223-3

Printed in the United States of America

All Rights Reserved

DEDICATION

I dedicate this book to citizens who are unjustly subjected

to laws of victimless crimes as well as ones who are the

actual victims of crimes.

SPECIAL THANKS

I want to thank my son, Jack Truman, for all the time and hard

work he has spent helping me reach my goals and dreams that

I had never thought possible and had forgotten many years ago.

INTRODUCTION

This study is composed of eight books. Victimless

crimes are identified as well as crimes that are

actually committed against others.

Victimless crimes such as drugs, prostitution, gambling, and

pornography are the ones that should not be

subjected to the laws that are now in force. Actual

crimes committed against others such as dispensing

legal drugs to children like ritalin, prozac, and diet,

childhood obesity, toxins ingested which cause violent

behavior instead of proper nutrition, human trafficking, and the

continuation of slavery in America are the crimes that

law enforcement needs to place its concentration.

I hope this book will help others realize the difference

between victimless crimes and actual crimes that are

committed against others. It is my objective of this study to

display the fact victimless crimes laws should not exist.

Instead, more concentration needs to be placed on actual

crimes committed against others. These are the crimes that

need to be subjected to law enforcement.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

THE INJUSTICE OF LEGISILATION AGAINST VICTIMLESS CRIMES IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WITH SPECIAL EMPHASIS ON DRUGS, PROSTITUTION, GAMBLING, AND PORNOGRAPHY

THE FANTASY OF THE DRUG WAR

CONTEMPORARY ISSUES AND TRENDS IN THE CONSIDERATION OF THE MEDICINAL VALUE REGARDING MARIJUANA WITH RESPECT TO HISTORY

PROMOTING POSITIVE LIFESTYLE CHANGES DUE TO IGNORANCE AS RELATED TO CHILD ABUSE IN THE FORM OF DISPENSING SUCH DRUGS AS RITALIN, PROZAC, AND DIET DRUGS TO CHILDREN IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

A CONSIDERATION THAT CHILDHOOD OBESITY COULD BE CLASSIFIED AS LEGALIZED CHILD ABUSE

A CORRELATION EXISTS BETWEEN NUTRITION, TOXINS, AND VIOLENT BEHAVIOR

TRANSNATIONAL HUMAN TRAFFICKING WITH AN EMPHASIS ON FORCED PROSTITUION

CONTINUATION OF SLAVERY IN AMERICA

REFERENCES

The Injustice of Legislation

Against Victimless Crimes in the United States of America

With Special Emphasis on

Drugs, Prostitution, Gambling, and Pornography

ABSTRACT

Injustice should never be evident in a culture of a free society which places individual freedom as the most prominent element composing the basis of all its laws and ideals. It should be the priority of a free society to guarantee the concept of individual freedom to all its citizens no matter how unpopular a certain freedom is to others in the society. In relation to this type of society, the government should never be allowed, to its benefit, unlimited liberty to decide which freedoms to outlaw and which to remain free. Advocates in favor of classifying vices as crimes are incorrect and adhere to the basic concept of injustice.

The concept of injustice is running rampant in the United States of America. While the government proclaims freedom for all, it places restrictions on these freedoms through the element of injustice. This is accomplished most predominantly when laws are legislated against victimless crimes by considering vices in the same category as crimes.

The government selectively decides between which vices will be criminalized and the ones that will be decriminalized. Whether criminalization against vices through legislation or decriminalization in favor of vices by legalization occurs depends on which act will benefit the government in such manners as economic success or place it in good standing with particular special interest groups (Johnson, 2002).

Government that governs least, governs best; therefore it should not be in the business of legislating public morality and criminalizing deviance. Rather governments should be concerned with prohibiting those activities that are harmful to

individuals other than those who willingly took part in activities that hurt no other. Furthermore, we should not be confusing 'offense' with the more serious notion of 'harm'. While the former is merely an annoyance that we must tolerate in a pluralistic society, the latter is an act of evil that poses obvious public dangers and thus warrants criminalization. The so-called victimless crimes should not be crimes at all. Criminalizing these vices can interfere with a citizen's pursuit of happiness (Sterling, 2002).

America, after all, was founded upon ideals, where everyone should be free with equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. America is home of the Bill of Rights, limited government, and the American Dream. Libertarians think that their philosophy, no matter how radical sounding, is the actual implementation of these American ideals. They allege that unless we follow these ideals, America is destined to remain a facade where noble ideals are held, but

not practiced (Johnson, 2002).

This study offers the idea that vices should never be considered crimes. It is in the best interests of the citizens of the United States of America to realize that if their country is to remain a free society, then all individual liberties must be allowed.

Individual liberty is at the core of philosophy for free thinkers such as libertarians. The libertarian philosophy is an ethical and moral appeal to a Lockian conception of natural rights that should never be infringed. It is one in which individuals, being separate, distinct, and in charge of their own lives, should have the liberty to conduct their lives as they so desire as long as they hurt no one else (Johnson, 2002). This philosophy maintains that the more individual liberty, the more bountiful our lives, ethically and materially, individually and collectively which is both ideal and common sensical for all mankind. That which runs against individual liberty is wrong

and undesirable.

Since everyone's individual liberty is paramount in this philosophy, libertarians will even defend their opponent's freedom. Like Voltaire, libertarians may not like what you say or do; but they will defend to the death your right to say or do it as long as you hurt no other (Johnson, 2002) due to the fact that after a certain age, an individual owns his or her person and property (Durante, 1996). Libertarians oppose any policy that restricts freedom.

In relation to civil freedoms, the results of this philosophy are straightforward. In the same vein that United States citizens are guaranteed such liberties as freedom of speech and religion; so should they be allowed individual freedom in relation to such illegal activities as drugs, prostitution, gambling, and pornography. Programs that run against civil liberties such as these are doubly offensive because they violate both civil and economic liberties.

Libertarianism pursues liberty rather than economics or the rich with the free market acting as a positive response to libertarianism. The private sector, which operates according to the free market, naturally works in ways government cannot hope to mimic and benefits all of us (Johnson, 2002). Laws against consensual activities are opposed to the principles of private property, free enterprise, capitalism, and the open market. The economic system in the United States is based on the sanctity of private property. What a citizen owns is his or her own business. An individual can give it away, trade it, or sell it for a profit or a loss, none of which is the government's business. This is the system known as capitalism. For the government to say that certain things cannot be owned, bought, given away, traded or sold is a direct violation of both the sanctity of private property and the fundamental principles of capitalism (Sterling, 2002). With freedom and the profit motive comes competition which gives the United States citizen the

best quality products and services at the cheapest cost.

By contrast, the government's enforcement against victimless crimes causes the rise in prices for illegal goods and services to such an artificially high cost which increases the incentive for real criminals to sell such goods and services or fake unsafe substitutions in their place (Johnson, 2002). In order to pay these artificially inflated prices, some of those who take part in consensual crimes commit real crimes such as mugging, robbery, burglary, forgery, embezzlement, and fraud. If consensual activities were cheap, real crimes would decrease significantly. In addition, to someone who is regularly breaking a law against a consensual activity, all laws may start to seem unimportant (Sterling, 2002).

As a result, an overabundance of arrests are made against violators of victimless crimes without ever making a real dent in their prevalence or availability (Johnson, 2002). Roughly half of the arrests and court cases in the Unites States each year

involve consensual crimes which are actions that are against the law, but directly harm no one's person or property except, possibly, the consensual criminal. More than seven hundred fifty thousand people are in jail because of actions they performed that did not physically harm the person or property of another. Furthermore, more than three million people are on parole or probation for consensual crimes. Also, more than four million people are arrested each year for doing something that hurt no one but, potentially, themselves. The injustice does not end.

Making consensual activities crimes allows the government to take action by forcibly destroying the life of the consensual criminal just because he or she is different by stripping away the individual's civil rights. A single arrest and conviction, even without a jail sentence, can permanently affect one's ability to obtain employment, housing, credit, education, and insurance. In addition, there is the emotional, financial, and physical

trauma of arrest, trial, and conviction. If any significant amount of jail time is added to this governmental torture, an individual's life is almost certainly ruined.

Throwing people in jail is the extreme. At what point does behavior become so unacceptable that certain citizens should tell the government to imprison other people? This should be done only when they physically arm the person or property of another (Sterling, 2002). William James related to the problem of victimless crimes, The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own particular ways of being happy provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours (James, 1893).

A huge prison bureaucracy has evolved to care for those persons whose crimes do not result in any harm to anyone else. Similarly, a vast amount of citizens' resources are now being spent to support peace officers, guards, office workers, and so on, involved in the pursuit and control of persons not harming

anyone (Johnson, 2002).

This is extremely expensive. The government is spending more than fifty billion dollars per year catching and jailing consensual criminals. An additional one hundred fifty billion dollars in potential tax revenues is being lost. In other words, each man, woman, and child in this country is paying eight hundred dollars per year to destroy the lives of five million fellow citizens (Sterling, 2002). California, alone, expends two point six billion dollars a year to support a political machine which criminalizes offenders who have no victim (Johnson, 2002). If all victimless crimes were legalized, they could be taxed which could be an enormous benefit for America's economy.

If the government did nothing else but declare consensual crimes legal, two hundred billion dollars could be saved each year making it possible to wipe out the national debt in twenty years or reduce personal income tax by one third. Another

economic high point is that moving the underground economy of consensual crimes aboveground would create six million tax paying jobs. Another matter to consider is that of interest. The fifty billion dollars which is spent jailing consensual criminals is not just spent. It is borrowed. As the national debt grows larger, six percent interest compounded over thirty years adds two hundred fifty billion dollars to that fifty billion dollar figure (Sterling, 2002). This expense was not evident twenty years ago; since many actions which are considered criminal offenses today were not considered as such at that time. The crime rate has, actually, been indexed upward due to the increase of classifying victimless crimes as criminal

(Gray, 2002).

The United States government uses victimless crimes to control and manipulate its citizens. All victimless crime laws should be repealed; since they erode respect for the law. If society tries to justify even one of these laws, the others will be

more likely to stay around (Newman, 2002).

A major factor in the growth of big government has been the propensity of legislative bodies attempting to criminalize such personal behavior which is unpopular and offensive to a particular sectarian tradition but which does no harm to anyone other than the person involved, if then (Johnson, 2002). People may destroy their own lives by taking part in consensual crimes which is unfortunate; but that is their business (Sterling, 2002). When the government attempts to impede the liberties of individuals such as the enforcement of victimless crimes, it does not work. People will pursue their individual liberties anyway, and government action will only make it worse.

In reality, this is exactly the objective law enforcement is attempting to achieve. It does not really desire the elimination of victimless crimes just as the military does not want to make world peace and the social services do not desire eliminating poverty. If these agencies were that successful, they would no

longer be necessary.

Libertarians advocate minimalistic government. They want to walk a fine line between having just enough government to protect individual liberties, but not so much that it interferes with them. They maintain that if you want safety, secure your freedom, not the bureaucrat's; and if you want freedom you have to give it to others (Johnson, 2002).

Various countries offer more individual liberty to their citizens than the United States. One such country is Sweden which adheres to the concept of Libertarianism and believes in the legalization of all victimless crimes. Included in the Swedish Manifesto is the idea that all individuals have the right to life, liberty, and property and that every individual has the right to do as he or she pleases as long as that right does not infringe on the equal rights of others (Criminal, 1985). Benjamin Franklin gave his opinion of individual liberty, "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little

temporary safety deserve neither liberty or safety" (Durante, 1996).

All citizens in America have the right to be different. The laws against consensual activities take away that right. If citizens allow anyone to lose his or her freedom without just cause, then all freedom is lost to everyone (Sterling, 2002). Individual freedom is guaranteed in free societies such as the United States of America (Johnson, 2002).

In a free society, it is up to the individual to make their own moral choices. This concept is called liberty which is one of the main ideas in the composition of America (Miranda, 1996). The Preamble to the Constitution identifies the fact that one predominant purpose of the Constitution is to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. The Ninth Amendment states, The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. Clearly, the rights to life, liberty, and

the pursuit of happiness which are unalienable rights being incapable of being sold or transferred are specifically mentioned in the Declaration of Independence and are retained by the people. Any law that denies a United States citizen the liberty to perform the act of a victimless crime is unconstitutional (Johnson, 2002). Adlai E. Stevenson made a good point in reference to this subject, My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular (Stevenson, 2002). An individual's unpopularity is one element that can be utilized to provide the opportunity for one to use as a means of pursuing his or her pursuit of happiness.

Some people pursue and attain happiness in no other way than by violating the laws against victimless crimes such as drugs, prostitution, gambling, and pornography. They work all day in order to afford and enjoy these vices after work and on the weekends. The Constitution, which views people not as statistical averages but as individuals, should protect each

citizen who commits a victimless crime until such time as he or she, actually, harms another. But the Supreme Court does not always base its decisions on logic; therefore it is very difficult to declare the laws against victimless crimes as unconstitutional even though an irrefutable case can be made in ten seconds (Schaffer, 2002).

The prejudicial laws against consensual activities create a society of fear, hatred, bigotry, oppression, and conformity which is a culture opposed to personal expression, diversity, freedom, choice, and growth. Many people claim that the results of victimless crimes affects others besides the ones who commit them in a negative manner. This may be true in various instances; since no one is an island. If the government held each citizen legally responsible for his or her vices, very few people would be free.

The prosecution of consensual crimes trickles down into ostracizing, humiliating, and scorning people who do things

that are not quite against the law but probably should be which reinforces the idea that if they are different, they are bad. This seems to be the attitude for a large segment of American society. United States citizens are addicted to normalcy even if it means they must lop off significant portions of themselves to conform (Sterling, 2002).

Victimless crime laws are a legislative attempt to forcibly limit the lifestyle choices of individuals. The use of all recreational drugs other than alcohol and tobacco has been totally criminalized in the United States nationwide. Prostitution and gambling are illegal with the exception of only a few designated areas. The legality of pornography depends on the community standards as to whether it is permitted or not. The widespread criminalization of these victimless crimes in America is based on the belief that they cause a detriment to society. This is a false premise, and many of the premises which lead to a conclusion that society is more important than

the individual are, also, false. As society is a conceptual entity comprising of individuals, the good of society can never be more important than the good of the individuals who form that society (Euchner, 1999). Mohandas K. Gandhi sums this idea up, Truth resides in every human heart, and one has to search for it there, and to be guided by truth as one sees it. But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth (Sterling, 2002).

America is based on personal freedom and on the strength of diversity, not on unnecessary limitation as slavish conformity. The American dream is that we are all free to live our lives as we see fit, providing we do not physically harm the person or property of another. The United States Constitution and its Bill of Rights clearly give us the right to pursue our lives without the forced intervention of moralists, do-gooders, and busybodies.

The State cannot legislate morality (Brown, 2001).

Victimless crimes are actually moral crimes that are outlawed even though nobody involved is an unwilling participant and harms no other; therefore prohibition of consensual crimes is immoral and unconstitutional (Newman, 2002).

Most arguments in favor of maintaining laws against consensual activities have a religious foundation claiming variations of the act as not being moral. The objector's sense of morality, for the most part, is mainly derived from his or her religion while others claim cultural values as the basis of morality; but this set of cultural values usually stem from the sharing of a similar religion.

Laws against consensual activities violates the separation of church and state. The Constitution guarantees that not only can we freely practice the religion of our choice, but that the government will not impose religion upon us (Sterling, 2002). The Treaty of Tripoli in 1796 displays George Washington's views of religion and government, "The government of the

United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion" (Bovard, 1998).

Individual morality based on religious or spiritual beliefs can be invaluable. It can be an excellent guide for one's own life. But religious belief, especially someone else's, is a terrible foundation for deciding who does or does not go to jail. The government is then asked to enforce these religious beliefs by arresting the nonbelievers and incarcerating them

(Sterling, 2002).

Many confuse morality with legality. Just because something is morally wrong does not mean it should be illegal. When using the word illegal, it is important to remember how forceful the force of law truly is. Everyone is entitled to his or her own opinions about certain activities; but do most people really want to lock up other people who do not go along with their opinions? (Sterling, 2002) Besides, locking the violators of victimless crimes does not serve as a deterrent.

Laws against consensual activities are too randomly enforced to be either a