This is the Cater Daily Podcast for Friday, November 2nd, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

He went to prison for bank robbery, and while there he became a more than competent jailhouse lawyer,

ultimately getting the Supreme Court to accept multiple petitions.

Today, Sean Hopwood is a professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center.

He spoke at the Cato Institute's Cato Club 200 event.

This is a portion of his remarks.

The framers cared a great deal about criminal justice issues.

The right to a jury trial, the only right contained both in the body of the Constitution

and in the Bill of Rights.

And when the framers started out the federal government, they were very scared

about making federal criminal law. In fact, up until the 1870ss there were about 183 criminal statutes that carried criminal penalties.

1970 that had doubled, tripled, quadrupled to about 400.

And does anyone want to take a guess that how many criminal statutes today

can land you in federal jail or federal prison.

No one knows for certain.

What we do know is that the Heritage

tried to get a count a few years ago

and that it is over 5,000 statutes. The US Congress

thinks there are 5,000 things so serious that you could potentially go to prison or jail as a result. Well how did

we get there? A couple of reasons. We tend to think that civil law is no longer a great remedy for a lot of social problems

and that we must use the heavy hammer of criminal law and things like mandatory minimums.

...