A WHILE BACK, I had a project with the working title of Due Process When Everything is a Crime. It never quite jelled (there’s a chapter in the ethics book along these lines, and I wrote a review essay that drew on some of it) but the full-length project kind of ground to a halt after 9/11 and I never got the momentum back.

Now Gene Healy has produced a new book called Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything, that addresses the same problem: The growth of trivial-yet-potent criminal laws to the point that everyone is a felon, and prosecutorial discretion is the most important part of the justice system. It looks interesting enough that it’s got me thinking of restarting that project.