by Bill Allin

Created on: February 25, 2007   Last Updated: November 11, 2010

Laws too gentle are seldom obeyed; too severe, seldom executed.
- Benjamin Franklin, statesman, author, and inventor (1706-1790)

Most of us who are Baby Boomers or older grew up in a time when laws were to be obeyed. We knew what the laws were and it was our social (and family) responsibility to uphold them.

We didn't know much about those who freely and frequently broke laws because we didn't come in contact with them much. Recent studies in the US have shown that 90 percent of people today break laws frequently and without twinges of conscience. Most violations are minor, but they make laws in general seem like a social evil.

What changed? Why do we have so little respect for laws today compared to a couple of generations ago?

There are no simple answers to these questions, but I will try to simplify the complex answers and give you the opportunmity to think them through yourself.

Prior to the 1960s children were drilled formally and taught incidentally the range and scope of laws they were expected to obey, by parents, teachers and leaders of their respective church groups. In the interim, regular attendance at religious services dropped off dramatically, school curricula have been loaded to overflowing with "basic learning" information and skills and two parents working in most families have left little time for parental role modelling and direct teaching of the laws of their community and their nation.

As more children grew to be young adults who lacked knowledge about laws that affected them, more also became adults who were not clear about the moral obligations each person has to the social structure of their family and their community. In other words, they broke laws because they weren't certain the laws were all that important anyway or because they didn't know what the laws were.

Governments, reacting with shock to the increase in law breaking, passed more laws and bylaws. These became filled with details of specific examples of lawbreaking so that judges, magistrates and justices of the peace were left with fewer doubts as to what behaviours were illegal and what penalties should apply to each.

The plethora of laws to which each citizen must subscribe today is so complex that almost nobody knows what they all are. In their rush to create more laws and put more power into the hands of more police officers to catch more lawbreakers, the law makers neglected to provide clear and pervasive methods by which each child or adolescent would be able to learn

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