This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, March 10, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The criminal justice system in the United States needs reform.

The feds have created crimes out of activities that should be governed by state and local governments,

and prison cells are regularly wasted on people guilty of small-time drug crimes.

Mark Levin is Director of the Center for Effective Justice at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

We spoke last week.

There's been a tremendous growth in both the number and scope of criminal laws, both at the federal

level and at the state and local level. of you know and everybody knew what those were but now what we've seen is

this proliferation of crimes and in states you see it in their business code their

agriculture code natural resources code but concerning all sorts of things that

people never would believe could be criminal in Texas we have 11 felonies relating to harvesting oysters and so there's these thousands of criminal laws over 4500 now at the federal level the Congressional Research Office gave up, they couldn't count them all, and in Texas and Arizona we each have over 1,500 criminal offenses and that's just state.

Then there's the local ordinances and then of course there's the regulatory crimes that have been

created by bureaucracies, agencies at the state and federal level pursuant to broad statutes

that say any violation of agencies rule as a criminal offense and that's a huge

over-delegation of power to unelected bureaucrats.

So this is a very important area because it's critical that citizens know the line between

what is legal and what is criminal so they're on notice and therefore only with

that notice can there be a mens rea an intent to violate to do something wrong.

And so it's really important that we rein in this growth in criminal laws.

It's really been over the last several decades.

It's parallel the broader growth in government and that we ensure that there's a culpable

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