Free Society?

America is reputedly a free country, where people can live under the protection of the Constitution and its Bill of Rights. But lately I've been reflecting on how free, as a whole, our nation really is.

We all pretty much know about the massive influx of undocumented immigrants, mostly from Mexico but also from many areas spanning the globe, especially Britain, the Middle East, and China. For these people, walking the streets here is a different matter than for a citizen or "legal" resident. Seeking government protection for criminal or civil matters, doing anything involving filling out a detailed history, or just openly expressing oneself under the First Amendment can be a tricky matter for these millions of people living among us. Besides these, we have different strata of convicted criminals who have varying types of restrictions placed on their activities and expression. In a few states (including my Florida), convicted felons who have completed their punishments still are banned from exercising their right to vote. The probation and parole systems we have, ostensibly designed to keep convicts out of jails and more assimilated into society, actually serve the function of making the society that much more unfree, since these people, many of whom work and live around us, do not enjoy the same rights as do others. Increasingly, we also have certain criminals, such as arsonists and sexual predators, that have been adjudged impossible to fully rehabilitate, and hence must be limited in their movements and continuously pointed out in public (even after completing sentences). Besides all this, there is the gargantuan underground economy (drugs, gambling, pornography, prostitution), participants in which actually live within a parallel and brutally unfree society, compared to the "open" one that is supposedly represented by due process and fairness. If you are African-American, I probably don't need to tell about the phenomenon of racial profiling ("driving while black") that has continued to make many feel like second-class citizens. And why do prosecutors keep insisting on trying minors, not as minors, but as adults? Many arrests and convictions nowadays don't even involve real crimes and real victims, but instead are the state-manufactured results of sting operations. Ordinary citizens are encouraged to rat on each other to the government through many types of anonymous "snitch" lines that are creepily reminiscent of the old KGB police state era in the Soviet Union. And now we have people targeted for criminal investigation who end up being prosecuted not for the crime that they were suspected of, but for lying to an investigative body about their role. Maybe none of the above apply to you. But suppose you're just walking down the street minding your own business and the wind is blowing in your face. You just might not hear the policeman behind yelling at you before he or she sends a Taser's 50,000 volts into your body (and then shackling you and hauling you off to jail)! Sound farfetched? I would have thought so, too, until recently.

To remedy some of these problems involves taking some bold and admittedly politically risky steps. Many of the victimless crimes that are a hallmark of the underground economy need to either be drastically decriminalized or even legalized. We need a comprehensive plan, similar to the one that President Bush and the Senate approved, that allows undocumented immigrants to be able to openly participate in a free society. Convicts who have finished their sentences should be fully accepted back into society with a clean slate in order to really get a "second chance". If certain crimes are so heinous that offenders have to be constantly monitored and restricted after release, then perhaps the sentencing should reflect that by being much stiffer, without the post-release "gray area". And police and prosecutors need some judicial oversight to restrain them from excesses that undermine freedom and the general good of society.