I was asked to start a thread to substantiate the claim that a majority of Americans have committed a felony.
Here are my general assumptions/framework:
[ol]
[li]I’m assuming we’re talking about teens and adults. A more carefully-worded version of my claim would be that the average American commits a felony crime some time in their lifetime. But that’s a bit harder to do back-of-the-envolope math on, so let’s construct the claim as being that the majority of those 12+ have committed a felony.[/li][li]I’m assuming that if self-reporting is biased, it is biased toward not admitting criminal behavior. The only real measure of whether someone has committed a crime and not been caught is self-reporting. Naturally, this is prone to some error. But I think any such errors work against me since people are more likely to underreport their own criminal behavior. [/li][li]I’m mostly looking at federal law, but where I’m not, I’m assuming that is something is a felony in more than a handful of states then we can call it a felony for our purposes. If someone is a nominal felon under one state’s laws but not in another then my point is just as strongly established (which is that criminals, as an undifferentiated category not fundamentally different from you and me—they are just less lucky based on their race, where they live, policing tactics, etc., and the fact that your state happens to draw the felony line slightly differently is part of that same category of things).[/li][li]I’m assuming there is not 100% overlap between offenders. The biggest issue is that we’re going to be looking at survey data for multiple crimes, and there’s not a lot of information about how much overlap there is between individuals. For example, are we to assume that the millions of people who drive drunk are co-extensive with the millions who upload pirated movies and the millions who have possessed cocaine? I think there probably is a lot of overlap, but that it’s not perfectly co-extensive. If and when there’s data, I’ll try to find it. Otherwise, I’ll make conservative assumptions about overlap.[/li][/ol]
There are thousands of felony crimes in the United States under federal law alone. The sheer proliferation of crimes—many of which you probably don’t even know about—is part of my overall argument that most people have committed felonies. But I nevertheless intend to limit myself to a handful of felonies that are very common and for which we have some data on prevalence. I propose that we examine the following crimes:
This list will miss a huge number of crimes that many people have committed. But I think it will nevertheless be enough, alongside some conservative assumptions, to prove my point.
I’ll start with the first one. I’ll move on to the others as time allows, but if someone wants to get there first, I welcome you.
**When is it a felony?
**
Under federal drug law, possession doesn’t become a felony until you’ve already been caught once. That makes talking about un-policed felonies sort of awkward, since by definition we’re talking about people who have not been caught. Reasonable people can disagree about whether—assuming the premises of our little thought experiment—someone who uses drugs twice is a felon. So I will instead rely on the fact that first-time possession is a felony for each of the illicit drugs (including marijuana) in more than a handful of states (see the laws of Arizona, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, and South Dakota for examples). I would add that the self-reported data does not indicate whether any drug paraphernalia was present (as it often is), or whether the circumstances would otherwise have kicked the possession up to a felony in places where it otherwise wasn’t. See, e.g., 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3) (making it a felony to possess a gun while using drugs). So I think it’s fair to consider illicit drug users felons for the purposes of the OP.
How many have done it?
The best data on drug and alcohol usage are the SAMHSA surveys. The 2012 survey (which I think is the most recent) says that 48% of Americans over the age of 12 have used “illicit drugs” including 14.5% who have used cocaine, 14.6% who have used hallucinogens, and 20.9% who have used prescriptions drugs not prescribed to them.
This data does not examine all those involved in the distribution networks of drugs. We might assume they are likely to have tried their product at least once and therefore not increase our number (though I don’t really know how true that is). But one thing that should be noted from the SAMHSA data is that “more than one half of the nonmedical users of pain relievers, tranquilizers, stimulants, and sedatives aged 12 or older got the prescription drugs they most recently used from a friend or relative” and that only “4.0 percent of these nonmedical users in 2011-2012 took pain relievers from a friend or relative without asking.” That means many of those people are also guilty of felonies, and would increase our number if they did not otherwise illegally partake.
So I think this category alone, with room for lessening the topline number because of the gray legal aspects, gets us a substantial distance toward 50%.
According to this guy Americans unwittingly commit three felonies per day.
Anecdotally I was having some drinks with a friend of mine who had recently become a Chicago cop. He mentioned to me that pissing off a police officer is a bad idea because they can almost always find something you did wrong to arrest you for and make your life miserable. A bit of hyperbole but not a lot I suspect.
If you agree that (except for Arizona, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, South Dakota, and any other state that makes it a felony to possess any marijuana) marijuana use is not per se a felony, then I don’t agree you’ve gotten substantially towards 50%.
And I think the overlap is going to be immense – that is, many of the folks that are cavalierly taking other people’s meds are also the people happily firing up doobies.
I don’t have any figures to back it up, but remember that laws are not made against things that no one ever does. Laws are passed to regulate things that people do.
None of those specific ones for me, but I do know that Grand Theft is a felony most everywhere, though the exact amount varies between states. Still, that variation is mostly in the $300-$1000 range, which isn’t all that much nowadays–a crap ton of school/college-level pranks probably qualify (some of mine certainly did)
Then you should address my arguments for why it is reasonable.
In particular, from the OP: “If someone is a nominal felon under one state’s laws but not in another then my point is just as strongly established (which is that criminals, as an undifferentiated category not fundamentally different from you and me—they are just less lucky based on their race, where they live, policing tactics, etc., and the fact that your state happens to draw the felony line slightly differently is part of that same category of things).”
I submit that it is the rare and exceptional person who looks to his state law on possession before deciding whether to smoke that doobie in college. Nor am I clear on why such a person, if he otherwise would have smoked it, should be excluded for our analysis of whether most people are “criminals” in this sense.
You should also address the fact that the vast majority of that number are people who have used multiple times (a felony if caught both times), and that these numbers underreport the true number of drug felonies solely by possession because they do not include aggravating circumstances that make it a felony (gun ownership, for example, which is very common in America).
I’m eager to hear you out, but I put all that information in my first two posts for a reason and you’ve largely ignored it and just said “nuh uh.”
[Also note that even if you exclude marijuana entirely the number is 30%]
The 48% figure is not cumulative, so the overlap you state there is irrelevant. I agree that there is probably overlap with the people giving away their meds, and so I didn’t even put a figure on that. But even if only 10% of those giving them away do not use illegal drugs, that increases the numbers significantly because of how common it is.
A friend of mine once figured that if he got the average sentence for every felony he had committed by age 25, he’d be in jail for several life sentences. The state he lived in didn’t have “Romeo & Juliet” laws on the books, so every time he (18) went over to his 17 year old girlfriend’s house with the intent of sexing her up, he committed statutory rape, burglary, several “deviant sexual acts,” and probably a few more.
I don’t know how to search on this - this is usually considered a felony?
Again, this does not do much to establish that most adults are felons.
Does that depend on the amount of drugs transferred - i.e. taking two Vicodin is a misdemeanor but taking the whole bottle, or selling them, is a felony? I am asking because I don’t know, not as a gotcha.
Some but not all illegal downloading/uploading is a felony. If you upload (or even just seed) a movie that hasn’t been released to DVD, for example, it is a felony. If you download more than a certain value of music, games, whatever in a 180-day period it is a felony. My intent was to spell this out more when I got to that particular post. I realize the serial posts is a little annoying, but I wanted to be thorough.
As you might imagine, it varies from state to state and drug-to-drug. Distribution of drugs is generally treated more harshly than possession, and distribution need not be for profit. I believe giving away all but Schedule V drugs is a felony under federal law, but am not 100% sure. This was part of the reason I did not try to quantify that number.
When you drill down, though, they stop being as absurd as the overview suggests.
For example, he says:
Wow. Clear plastic bags! An outrage.
But from the 11th Circuit opinion:
The issue wasn’t the clear plastic – it was the processing and the harvest of under-sized and egg-bearing lobsters, things that the United States ALSO prohibits. A reasonable importer ought to understand that if U.S. law prohibits something, it’s prudent to check if foreign law does also. In other words, this law doesn’t come out of left field.
The next case:
The actual facts:
Is there any case there that you feel actually establishes the claim?
No, no. You don’t get to make a claim like this and then cast the net wider by choosing the most restrictive laws anywhere in the country and then applying them to the whole country. People may not look up state laws, but are certainly generally aware of what kind of penalties and how serious those penalties are for various acts.
How many of those people, if caught once, would have continued to use?
I think this would probably snag a decent number of people. One site I saw said that if you copied more than $2,500 worth of copyrighted material in 180 days, it could be a felony. Assuming that number is correct, I imagine a large number of people have downloaded enough copyrighted porn to hit that number. What’s the average retail value of a porn DVD? Maybe $30? So, downloading the equivalent of 83 porn movies over the course of half a year? That’s gonna be a lot of people. Does watching a streaming movie count? If so, then a ton of people will probably cross the threshold into felony land.
I don’t know. It’s your assertion that there’s a relevant difference between using twice and using once getting caught and using again. Feel free to back your assertion.
I don’t think it’s a good one for the reason I put in the OP, repeated for you, and that you still haven’t addressed. I also don’t think it’s a good one because my speculation is that most people caught using once do use again. But I welcome you to prove your point.
Plus, I don’t know if this is a nitpick or not. But how can one be sure that a given act is a felony until one has been charged as a felony?
Sure, maybe in theory I could be charged with a felony if I don’t report my tips to the IRS. But how likely is it that I can get off with paying back taxes with penalties and interest? And if I do, is that still a felony? If I plead to a misdemeanor, am I still guilty (in the sense of this thread) of a felony?
How to interpret the scope of the question in the thread title turns on the purpose for which this argument is deployed, I think, Shodan. That’s true for your questions as much as it is for whether it is reasonable to count people who violated many state laws but not the laws of the state they were in.
I think Jimmy Chitwood put it well:
That’s more or less what I was trying to express with this argument about the majority of people committing felonies. But it’s relevant to other things too, like felony disenfranchisement.
The fact that some people are charged with a felony and not others is the whole point. If you’re a white guy smoking pot in his suburban basement, the likeihood of you being charged with a crime approaches 0. If you’re a black guy smoking pot in a public park, the odds are much higher. Ditto the enforcement of tax evasion versus other in-person thefts, or weapons violations in high-crime neighborhoods versus the gun range.
The big variable isn’t as much how people behave as it is their circumstances.
