According to Glenn Harlan Reynolds, we’re in a Felonious Funk:
Felonies were once a fairly rare class of crime, a class that generally carried capital punishment as a more-than-theoretical possibility. A felon was, by virtue of his heinous acts, an outcast from society. Even if permitted to live, he was expected to bear the mark of his iniquity for life, in the form of lost civil rights like the right to vote and the right to bear arms. To be a felon was to be a permanent outcast within one’s own society.But felonies aren’t so few anymore. New felonies are being created all the time, often for activity that seems, morally, not terribly awful. [...] Where once “felony” meant things like murder, rape, or armed robbery, now it includes things like music piracy, or filling in potholes that turn out to be “wetlands.” As the title to a recent book edited by Gene Healy notes, we’ve achieved the criminalization of almost everything.
Which means, in fact, the criminalization of almost everyone, too — if you haven’t been convicted of some felony or other, it’s probably because no prosecutor has tried to put you away, not because you haven’t committed one, whether you realized it at the time or not.