No one scrutinizing American criminal justice can fail to be impressed by the tremendous range of demands that are placed on the system. This can be demonstrated in various ways. First, we may note the sheer bulk of penal statutes and observe the accelerating rate at which these additions to the criminal law have occurred. This tendency certainly has not slackened in the years since 1912.
Crime waves are forever, or so it sometimes seems.
To bring the matter to the present, the United States Congress, at the close of 1994, passed the Federal Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, increasing the federal government's direct role in fighting crime. Some of the law's provisions include making youth gang membership a federal crime and setting a mandatory minimum sentence of ten years without parole for persuading someone under eighteen to join. At the moment, there are more than 3,000 Federal criminal laws on the books. More interesting than the mere volume of modern criminal legislation is the remarkable range of human activities now subject to criminal penalties. We should not assume that this striking expansion of criminal liability has proceeded in a rational and orderly fashion or that, until recently, it has attracted any substantial amount of thoughtful and scholarly inquiry.