Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent is a book by attorney Harvey Silverglate arguing that the expansion of the federal criminal code has made every American a technical felon. Silverglate discussed the book and its themes across multiple appearances on The Bob Zadek Show, where host Bob Zadek treated it as a recurring reference point for debates about overcriminalization, campus speech, and federal policing.
The book and its thesis
Silverglate summarized the book’s premise during a 2022 episode: the average American, going about daily life whether they know it or not, is probably committing three felonies a day The FBI: Our Uninvited Federal Police Force (2022). He described the book as written two decades earlier, a bestseller at the time, and still relevant because there is now more federal criminal law than when it was written.
The mechanism Silverglate identified is jurisdictional rather than substantive. Federal fraud, he said, is essentially undefined; the statute reaches any fraud committed through the use of the mails or in interstate commerce, which gives the federal government jurisdiction. The crimes themselves are ill-defined—whatever the federal government decides should be criminal this week. He invoked the saying that a grand jury can indict a ham sandwich, adding that it can do so as long as the ham sandwich gets on the telephone.
Silverglate grounded the argument in a principle of English common law: nobody should be prosecuted for something unless they knew what they were doing, intended to commit the crime, and the crime is readily defined. That principle, he said, has been lost in the federal system. He also noted that the Constitution does not give the federal government plenary power to enforce criminal laws, and that it is specific about which federal criminal laws there should be—piracy and counterfeiting among them.
The FBI and institutional blackmail
In the 2022 episode, Zadek framed the hour around Silverglate’s proposal to abolish the FBI, calling it a perfect solution. Zadek described his own childhood admiration for the Bureau—radio drama like G-Men and the television series The FBI starring Efrem Zimbalist Jr.—and said he had been brainwashed, citing the FBI’s treatment of Martin Luther King, Aretha Franklin, hippies in general, the Steele Dossier, Hillary Clinton’s laptop, and Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Silverglate connected the book’s thesis to the Bureau’s power over Congress. He said quite a few federal prosecutors had confided to him that they are shocked by the dishonesty of FBI agents, but cannot say so publicly without sacrificing their careers; a couple of federal judges and quite a few law professors had told him they agree. He attributed part of the Bureau’s grip on Congress to the fact that it has so much on so many congressmen—not because congressmen are corrupt, but because, under the three-felonies-a-day thesis, a federal crime can be pinned on just about anybody. Congressmen, being busy and active people engaged in many financial transactions, are each susceptible to being charged with a federal felony. Silverglate called this a symbiosis between the federal criminal code and the Bureau, and a vicious one.
Zadek closed the episode by extending the point to agency mission creep generally, citing the CDC’s national eviction moratorium during COVID as an example of an agency expanding beyond its original purpose. He described the FBI as our uninvited federal police force.
Federalism and the Civil War
Silverglate argued in the 2022 episode that federal overreaching is a result of the Civil War. Slavery, he said, had a terrible impact in many ways that still lives with us, and one of the things it did was blacken the notion of states’ rights, because one of the things the Southern states did was keep slaves. That does not mean, he continued, that states should not have powers and rights the federal government does not interfere with—slavery, in his account, was responsible for the destruction of federalism in this country.
Zadek agreed and generalized: the power of the states over their people, as opposed to the power of the federal government, worked fine but for slavery. There was no other issue where it was felt a national law was needed. He said there never was and never will be a need for a national rule governing speed limits, driving age, use of alcohol, or use of drugs—these can be regulated at the local level, which promotes freedom.
Across episodes: from campus speech to policing to the Bureau
The excerpts show the same book invoked in three different contexts over roughly a decade, with the treatment shifting in emphasis but not in argument. In the 2011 episode, Zadek introduced Silverglate as co-founder and chairman of the board of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and noted that Silverglate had appeared once before on the occasion of Three Felonies a Day, a show Zadek described as well-received and popular on his website. Silverglate described FIRE’s mission as taking on the totalitarian mentality among administrators and some professors—mostly administrators—on American campuses, and traced FIRE’s founding to the response to The Shadow University, the book he co-authored with Alan Charles Kors, after hundreds of students and their parents reported being punished for saying politically incorrect things.
In the 2014 episode, Zadek invoked the book himself rather than hosting its author, telling Alice Goffman that he had had on the show a couple of years earlier the author of Three Felonies a Day, Harvey Silverglate, who talked about how every American probably commits three federal felonies a day without knowing about it. Zadek used the reference to link overcriminalization to what he called the concept he abhors, zero tolerance—no room for judgment and flexibility, students suspended for pointing fingers in the shape of a gun or eating a Pop-Tart into approximately the shape of a gun. He said the rules are aggressively enforced in the inner cities and less aggressively enforced in Princeton. Goffman agreed and called for reform of sentencing and reform of policing, describing how Mike’s mother used to talk about the police as an occupying force—anonymous SWAT teams and task forces that swooped in with the sole goal of arresting as many men in the neighborhood as possible. She said the combination of aggressive arrest-based policing, mandatory minimums, and three strikes had created perverse incentives, massive incarceration, and violation of personal liberty.
The 2022 episode is the only one of the three in which Silverglate himself develops the book’s argument at length, adding the jurisdictional mechanism, the common-law principle, the congressional-blackmail symbiosis, and the federalism genealogy. The 2011 episode supplies the FIRE and campus-speech frame; the 2014 episode supplies the policing and zero-tolerance frame, but in Zadek’s voice rather than the author’s. What changes across the excerpts is the target—campus administrators, then inner-city policing, then the FBI—while the underlying claim about the volume and indeterminacy of federal law remains constant. What does not appear in the excerpts is any development or revision of the thesis itself; Silverglate restates it in 2022 in the same terms Zadek attributed to him in 2014.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the book’s publication date, publisher, or full subtitle beyond the title as given. They do not describe any specific case, statute, or prosecution in detail, and they do not report the book’s reception beyond Zadek’s characterization of it as a bestseller and of the earlier show as popular. The 2011 and 2022 excerpts break off mid-section, so the discussions of public versus private universities and of the FBI’s culture of corruption are not available here.