Criminalization is the process of transforming behaviours into crimes and individuals into criminals. Over-criminalization is the act of imposing penalties that are not proportional to the severity of the crime or the culpability of the wrong doer. The last major revision of the Iowa Criminal Code was in 1978 and I checked out the 1979 issue of the code and made rough count of the number of statutes and decided there were about 800. The Iowa Criminal Code today contains more than 3,000 statutes. In revising the code in 1978 the legislature tried to make the penalties proportional to the severity of the crime. Since then the trend has been to increase penalties in a rather haphazard manner that resembles a drunkards walk. Mandatory minimum sentences have made culpability nearly irrelevant. In my opinion we have over-criminalized but others disagree they think there are not enough crimes and the penalties are too lenient. It appears to me that the process of over-criminalization has slowed but that may be temporary. I am not optimistic that the process at the state level will be reversed in the near future. The question is what can be done at the local level about local ordinances that have been criminalized by including them in the Iowa Criminal Code. In other word charging as an ordinance violation with a fine only penalty instead of a criminal violation with a possible jail sentence.
Posted on: Fri, 02 Aug 2013 01:18:01 +0000
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