>> And if we go back to the idea of the prison industrial complex, and
its forerunner,
the military industrial complex, I think it was Eisenhower's concern,
it is precisely the existence of this complex, the military industrial complex.
When the structure is there, it's in place, then we go looking for
wars to keep it alive.
Similarly, since we have this prison industrial complex,
we now look for criminals in order to fill it.
And this seems, to me, to be the ultimate irony or perversion of a system.
>> It is a perversion.
It's not just looking for criminals, in many cases, creating criminals.
So how do you create criminals?
Well, you pass laws that criminalize certain behavior that previously was
not a crime.
And by that way, you create new classes of criminals.
So I mean,
people may have heard that the number of federal crimes that are on the books
has increased to a level where nobody really knows what that number is anymore.
Even federal prosecutors have no idea.
Federal judges have no idea.
Members of congress have no idea.
There are thousands of laws in the books, everything from committing treason and
acts of war to assaulting a federal chicken inspector.
These are all federal crimes.
On the state level, of course,
it's even multiplied even more because we have 50 different states.
And lawmakers, because of this whole tough on crime, lock them up and
throw away the key mentality, that has been a mainstay in American politics for
decades, at least 30 or 40 years.
There are numerous laws now on the books criminalizing a wide variety of behavior.
So as I mentioned, mental health has been criminalized in many ways,
substance abuse has been criminalized.
But even if you just take, say, one specific instance,
looking at sex offenders.
Before we had sex offender registries in the United States,
the Adam Walsh Act, and requiring sex offenders to register,
which is a relatively recent phenomenon in our nation's criminal justice history,
there was no crime for, say, failing to register or being a sex offender and
living in certain areas within, say, 1000 feet of the school.
Those were not criminal offenses.
But once those laws were passed, it has now created new criminal classes.
If you're a sex offender, and you're living within 1,000 feet of the school,
that's a crime.
Or if you fail to register, that's a crime.
And we will lock you back up for that crime.
With over 700,000 sex offenders registered in the United States,
now we've created a much larger body of people that we can incarcerate or
re-incarcerate for violating criminal statutes that previously did not exist.
So that's just one small slice.
Obviously, that's not part of the much bigger picture of criminalizing certain
behaviors in people in the United States, but it's just one example.