Rule of Law

Rule of law is one of the main reasons to even have a state. Yet it isn’t done well by governments. Research done by Robert Poole in Alameda County, California illustrates this; in one year there were 98,218 felonies reported to the police.

Victimization studies conducted by LEAA and the U.S. Census show that actual crime is 2-3x greater than reported. So, we can estimate the actual felonies at 245,545. For all these crimes, the police only arrested 13,695 adults and 6,798 juveniles.

Of the 13,695 adults, the police released 2,377 on grounds of insufficient evidence, requested misdemeanor complaints against 1,315, and requested actual felony complaints against 10,043.

But the district attorney’s office found that in only 4,946 of the felony cases was there sufficient evidence to warrant felony prosecution; of these 4,946, the municipal court dismissed or processed as misdemeanants 2,714, sending only 2,232 to superior court for felony trials.

Of these, 1,856 were convicted of felonies that means 12% of all arrested as felons, 1.7% of all reported felonies, or 0.7% of all actual felonies. Yet, America’s prisons holds 22% of the world’s entire prison population. This is not counting secret hidden prisons.

So, either, the American people are the worst people on the planet or there is something fundamentally wrong with our system.