Those charges, enumerated in Pennsylvania’s crimes code,
outlawed offenses ranging from murder to petty theft.
In the past four decades, they’ve nearly quintupled in
number — a trend that’s helped Pennsylvania’s prison populations skyrocket,
according to a report published
Thursday by the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania’s crimes code now contains 1,500 unique
offenses, ACLU researchers found, giving prosecutors a dizzying array of
charges to bring against alleged offenders.
The proliferation is the result of a decades-long,
bipartisan legislative trend that has dire real-world consequences, Nyssa
Taylor, legal counsel for the ACLU of Pennsylvania, said in a phone call with
reporters Thursday.
The expansion of the crimes code means that more people are
being charged with crimes, Taylor said, and makes it more likely that
prosecutors will secure convictions and lengthy sentences.
“These new laws are a boon that allows [prosecutors] to
bring numerous charges for a single crime,” Taylor said Thursday.
It’s no coincidence, Taylor said, that the expansion
coincides with an “explosion” in Pennsylvania’s prison and jail populations,
which nearly tripled between 1978 and 2015, data from the Prison Policy
Project, a nonprofit research institute, shows.
Taylor said that many of the offenses in Pennsylvania’s
crimes code are unnecessary and redundant. Others arise in response to isolated
events or criminal trends that grab attention in the news.
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