“The more we criminalize conduct that voters dislike, the more we put people who never intended any wrongdoing into the quicksand of criminal prosecution. With legions of prosecutors who are more interested in making names for themselves than in doing justice, Americans are living in an increasingly dangerous country. ‘At one time,’ lawyer Gene Healy writes, ‘the common law doctrines of mens rea (‘guilty mind’) and actus reus (‘guilty act’) cabined the reach of criminal sanctions, but those protections have eroded dramatically over the past 50 years. Today it’s possible to send a person to prison without showing criminal intent or even a culpable act…'”
http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/go-directly-to-jail-the-criminalization-of-almost-everything