Should Government Regulate Victimless Crimes Essay Research

Should Government Regulate Victimless Crimes. Essay, Research Paper

(note to user – made in word 2000)

Throughout history, there have been moral rules, enforced, which have been instituted by society as a whole due to the nature of their ethical shortcomings. These crimes against morale have often been called victimless, vice, or even consensual crimes. These offenses can hardly be considered crimes. A crime is defined as being ..an offense to one who is harmed by or made to suffer from an act, circumstance, agency, or condition. whereas a victimless crime is defined as .An illegal act that is felt to have no direct or identifiable victim, often associated with prostitution, gambling, and drug use. (Random House Webster.s College Dictionary 321 and 1485). By there being criminal action taken against victimless crime offenders, the government is contributing to the overpopulation of prisons, over expenditures used to control such crimes as drug use and prostitution, violations to human rights, and the breakdown of such procedures which have been deemed acceptable for centuries. Not until the past 500 years of our existence had laws been instituted against these so-called moral indignities. So, for those who are still captivated, my thesis will now set out to discover, .Should there be regulations on victimless crimes..

It has been shown that the government, in its efforts to control victimless crime, has spent an ever-growing amount of police time and taxpayer money for a cause that most would find trivial. An example of the waste of money towards controlling drugs entering and being dispersed within the country is the DEA, or the Drug Enforcement Agency. The amount of money the DEA had spent between the years of 1995 and 1998 had risen from $788 million annually to $1.099 billion annually (The World Almanac 108). In addition to spending time and money on capturing drug offenders, the government has wasted taxpayer revenue on court cases, and sending these so-called criminals to federal prisons where they are harbored to .think about what they.ve done.. These people are secluded from friends and family and are labeled as burdens upon society. These people are put into the same cells with rapists and murderers, however they are not outnumbered by any means. Drug related offenders make up 58.4%, or 56,291 of 95,522, of all sentenced federal prisoners which is a far cry from the 16.3% of drug related inmates in 1970 (Federal Bureau of Prisons Web Site). Another startling fact is that in 1970, though the information is somewhat outdated, almost . of all arrests in the United States were related to .victimless crimes. (Lentini 3). With even a minimal annual cost of $40,000 to maintain a federal prisoner, the government is still spending an estimated $2,251,640,000 (40,000 x 56,291) of taxpayer dollars.

Illegal drugs are usually considered the downfall of ones body. Their only purpose is to destroy and degrade. In many regards this is true, but can also be labeled upon any drug that is used in sufficient doses, which most often, will probably cause severe harm and sometimes death. Many drugs can cause this, even many which are available without prescription (Richards 167). Many of the harms cited as the basis for criminalization could be avoided by the same forms of regulation that are applied to presently legal drugs (Richards 167).

Many consider victimless crimes to be protected under the Declaration of Independence, the cornerstone of our American institution. The Declaration of Independence states many items which our forefathers found necessary to include while announcing their sovereignty from Britain. One of the most important and well-known quotes from the Declaration of Independence is ..that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. (McWilliams 62). The pursuit of happiness, what does that mean. I believe that it refers to each citizen.s individual search for prosperity and each individual.s rights as humans to .fulfill,. if you will, these originally Constitutional rights.

Of the victimless crimes, I believe that criminal action against prostitution is the most unnecessary misuse of police time, effort, and government spending. Until the 1960s, attitudes toward prostitution were based on the Christian view of immorality. Researchers have recently attempted to separate moral issues from the reality of prostitution. The rationale for its continued illegal status in the U.S. rests on three assumptions: prostitution is linked to organized crime; prostitution is responsible for much secondary crime; and prostitution is the cause of an increase in STD.s (Encarta .99). STD.s are a risk of any relationship, and it should be a personal decision for a person to request the services of a prostitute. Further, it is recognized that, often, enforcement of these crimes lead officers to do such undesirable practices as entrapment, illegal searches, and unauthorized audio surveillance (Lentini 4). Though there have been little signs of leniency towards such an undesirable offense, there has been some progress. Nevada, in 1971, reversed the long-standing law which has stood strong in every other state, allowing all counties with a population of less than 200,000 to license, tax or prohibit prostitution in cities and towns (Lentini 2-3). Prostitution can be con