The American Love Affair With Imprisonment...Continued

"Two men who took fruit and vegetables out of a garbage can have been sentenced to six months in jail..."

The DA also told the newspaper that "the plea bargain was the suspects' decision."

Right. Some choice. "Shut your mouth, admit guilt, and serve six months...or get ten years for making us go through the trouble of proving your guilt like we're supposed to do!"

Seriously, this whole obsession with jailing people for actions that victimize no one is appalling.

Notice too that while it is apparently illegal in some places to dumpster dive behind places of business, your own personal trash is fair game the moment you put it out on the curb, according to the US Supreme Court in a 1988 decision which reads in part:

It is common knowledge that plastic garbage bags left on or at the side of a public street are readily accessible to animals, *footnote 2 children, scavengers, *footnote 3 snoops, *footnote 4 and other members of the public. See Krivda, supra, at 367, 486 P. 2d, at 1269. Moreover, respondents placed their refuse at the curb for the express purpose of conveying it to a third party, the trash collector, who might himself have sorted through respondents' trash or permitted others, such as the police, to do so. Accordingly, having deposited their garbage "in an area particularly suited for public inspection and, in a manner of speaking, public consumption, for the express purpose of having strangers take it," United States v. Reicherter, 647 F.2d 397, 399 (CA3 1981), respondents could have had no reasonable expectation of privacy in the inculpatory items that they discarded."