Comment by RobotToaster
1 day ago
One issue is that imperfect enforcement is often how the momentum to change the law is created.
If the police had been able to swoop in and arrest the "perpetrators" every time two men kissed, homosexuality would have never been legalized; If they had been able to arrest anyone who made alcohol, prohibition wouldn't have ended; if they had been able to arrest anyone with a cannabis seedling, we wouldn't have cannabis legalization.
This brings up an often overlooked aspect of the role of laws in society, that it it’s important that there exist an ability to break laws. It’s critically important to the growth and flexibility of a society that laws are never perfectly enforced, that there remain ways to evade persecution. It is healthy. Faced with this situation, societies have to think further about what might have been missed in existing law that would cause ongoing skirting of the law and find better ways to structure its mutual responsibilities that we each impose on each other, often unjustly. It would be a terrible thing if the snapshot of laws at any given moment in time was allowed to be perfectly enforced. Laws are not moral documents. Their creation is fraught with unjust power grabs and non-universal moral codes. They are also created knowing that they will not be perfectly enforced and are given exaggerated cruelty when enforced to discourage others. Perfect enforcement would require a full rewrite of all laws.
Quite the opposite. A lot of obviously innocent people ending up in jail will have created a massive backlash a lot earlier, helping fixing idiotic legislation.
For crimes that require intention, people usually only end up in jail because they thought they could get away with it, because of imperfect enforcement.
If everyone knew they would be immediately arrested the second they sprouted a cannabis seed almost nobody would try.
Only if the legal system allows itself to be changed.
The present system in many countries is that criminal and civil codes are too large to be comprehended by a single person, too large to be changed rationally, and the processes too subject to corruption to be changed all at once.
That really depends upon the the reputation. If the police were to arrest a lot of 'very dangerous people', and all you see on the new is that they put the 'very dangerous people' in prison, then that isn't going to cause outrage. What causes outrage is when you know Mark down the street is one of those 'very dangerous people', but he was definitely not someone you gave your those vibes. So you look it up and notice the actual crime, even if it sounds bad on paper, means Mark might not actually be one of those 'very dangerous people'. A single instance isn't much, but across society this leads to questioning a law.
But it only happens because you got to know Mark originally. If he was already labeled a 'very dangerous person' and was arrested early on, there's a much better chance you wouldn't have gotten to know him, and the extent you would question the law would be very differently.
This is difficult to talk about in theoretical, because most examples are obvious cases of bad law (people already recognize the issues) or cases of good law that how dare I question (laws people don't recognize as an issue). People spend a lot of time thinking about a law that has already soured but hasn't been removed from the books, but rarely catch the moment that they realize the law originally soured in their mind (and any real world modern examples that might be changing currenlty would be, by their nature, controversial and quite easily derail the discussion).
Put shortly, those people are only obviously innocent (not deserving to be punished, but technically guilty of what the law stated) because the law was imperfect in enforcement and you got to know some of them before the law caught them.