We should always bear in mind that crime can never mean anything except the violation of law, when the violator is convicted; that it has no necessary reference to the general moral condition of man.  Is the number of criminal convictions growing, and if so why?  In the first place, the criminal code is lengthening every year.  When civilized man began making criminal codes, there were comparatively few things forbidden.  The codes were largely made up of those acts which, in some form, have for ages been generally thought to be criminal.  Religious beliefs, customs and habits were included in the penal statutes.  So were such things as sorcery and witchcraft.  Property was then not an important subject in man’s activities.  When the instinct to create and accumulate property began to rule life, the criminal code grew very rapidly.  Complex business interests, combined with the constantly increasing value placed on property, were always calling for new statutes.

The same tendency, indirectly, demanded still other statutes until at the present time this class of crimes makes up a large part of the criminal code and is growing steadily each year.  Then too, the necessity of property has called for the violation of this part of the criminal code more than any other, and it has naturally caused a considerable increase of crime.  Man in his social and political activities is ever weaving and bending and twisting back and forth.  For a number of years the universal tendency, especially in America, has been toward what is called “Social Control”, the idea being that more and more people should be controlled in an increasing number of ways.  Of course, if people are to be controlled they must be controlled by other people.  This policy has been extended until we are ever pushing further into the regulation of the habits, customs and lives of all the individual members of the community.  The majority, when it has the power, has never hesitated to force its ways of living, its ideas, customs and habits on the minority.  The majority, when strong enough, has always assumed that it was right, and provided that others must live its way or not at all.  The pendulum is now swinging far this way as is evidenced by prohibition, the persistent campaign for Sunday laws, and the growing belief in social control as a means of changing and directing humanity.

This has added to the criminal code and has increased the number of men in prisons.  Two statutes of recent date in most of the states are responsible for a very large increase in the number of convicts.  The conspiracy statute which is used today is a deliberate scheme on the part of prosecutors to get men into the penitentiary by charging an agreement or confederation of two or more persons to do something, which, if really committed, would be a misdemeanor, or no crime whatever.  Under this charge, whether made specifically or in connection with another crime, the rules of evidence have been opened and relaxed until the wildest and most remote hearsay is freely admitted for the plain purpose of convicting men who have really been guilty of no specific act.  It is in effect punishing one for his thoughts; the business of the court or jury being to find out whether in some particular he has an evil mind.