Our politicians demand it. It seems based upon fear. People are simply afraid. Today, with the wide spread use of drugs, no neighborhood is immune to crime, no neighborhood is safe. Unfortunately, those flames of fear are fanned, not just by the news media who serve up a steady stream of mayhem on the nightly news but, by the entertainment industry who saturate tv and movie screens with continuous tales of crime and violence.
Murder is on the daily menu.
This saturation of the public consciousness perpetuates the fear, and fuels a paranoia, that is bringing us to the brink of national hysteria. People are outraged. They elect politicians to appoint more prosecutors as judges and enact more and more laws, criminalizing more and more conduct, and imposing harsher and harsher sentences each year. Unfortunately, people seem more concerned with punishing the wrong than they are in determining who really committed it. Even though one of the most fundamental of our Constitutional Rights is the Right to be Presumed Innocent, surveys have repeatedly shown that most Americans today simply do not believe in that principle.