Stiffening Penalties

As a corollary to the breakdown of the Right to Privacy (which the Supreme Court says is in the constitution), let's look at the trend to stiffen penalties.
 
Here at Elite Inc. we feel that far too many laws are in place which punish people even when no actual harm has been done.
 
Now "we" are tightening penalties for a wide variety of things, many of which never should have been crimes in the first place.
 
If you browse through the archives of this blog, you will see many instances where we point out how someone is losing a chunk of their life for something that is of relatively little consequence. The state this country is in now, we're punishing people more and more for less and less, while keeping them from being able to do the things that are no problem out of sight.
 
If you browse through the web, you'll find many articles where something is being tightened, but not a single instance where penalties are being reduced. What does this mean? Philosophically it means that we were never punishing anyone enough in the first place. Do you agree with that? Morally it means that there is only one way to control the rampant rise in crime (which does not exist), to punish it harder. And Politically it means that more and more things are Bad everyday that were not worth noticing before, because in order to raise the penalties on some things, you have to have other things to be small penalties underneath. or maybe that's working in reverse since 9-11.
 
Any way you look at it, this situation is reprehensible. At the very least, without even considering whether things should be crimes in the first place, we should be lowering penalties at the same rate we raise them. There's another argument as to whether or not the overall state of punishment is hard enough, but noone has made the point that it's not, and we raise the bar never-the-less.
 
Unless there is a tremendous backlash, in a few years we will have so little privacy that it will be impossible to do anything anyone else disagrees with. Given the rate of expansion of crime penalties, and given the great increase in what's considered crime, you can expect to be beheaded for punishing your child. That's the world we're about to live in. Enjoy.