A New Federal Crime A Week

Fox News reports:

But today you might want to consider hiring a small team of researchers if you want to be confident you won’t end up in federal prison. And even then you couldn’t be sure.

There are at least 4,450 offenses in federal criminal law. That’s the number Louisiana State University law professor John S. Baker Jr., and his researchers came up with in a just-published report.

Baker’s work updates a 1983 count conducted by the Justice Department itself. That tally found more than 3,000 criminal laws — meaning that in just 25 years Congress has created some 1,400 criminal offenses.

Both Baker and the Justice Department cautioned that they couldn’t be sure they had found them all. Congress has scattered criminal offenses throughout the tens of thousands of pages of the United States Code.

Baker’s study also found that at least 454 federal crimes were added from 2000 to 2007. That’s an average of about 56 new federal crimes a year.

Very disturbing.