Snoop was actually arrested before (I believe during an awards show) for his connection with a gang-related shooting, although I think it was just his driver that ended up being convicted. That would have been a case in which there had been a victim.

Although I agree in principle on victim-less crimes, I have an incentive to support the government here as I cannot stand his genre of music or the spread of his “Snoop-isms” in speech, and I would likely prefer a world in which he was imprisoned and prevented from making more albums. Here’s a question for the audience: Am I a baptist or a bootlegger?

It’s more gut-level that that, Sam. Poor people don’t pay much tax, either in valuta or in work that is highly valued (by para-monetary standards) by the powers that be: this calculation is one that government officials understand well. In addition, in a mercantilist world, wealth and political influence tend to blend with each other. Throwing the wealthy in jail in such a world tends to be tantamount to throwing the insiders into the clink, which is hardly done in politics unless an example needs to be made. Ex-insiders, once on the outside, can cause too much trouble for the remaining insiders because exes know where the system is creaky, or is out of joint with popular myths about it.

[Of course, if an insider's reputation is already ruined beyond recovery, an example can be made of him or her. Skilling and the other Enron top dogs didn't exactly get let off the hook recently.]