Too many laws, too many prisoners (Economist)

Short summary:  Our criminal system is messed up and expensive.  A lot of laws are ambiguous or poorly written.  Thinking of this from a semantic web and social perspective...

How about a standard ontology for laws, and a dataset of all laws based on it.  Considering each country, state, jurisdiction have many similar laws, we're likely to see a lot of redundancy but also a lot of variation.  Attached to these laws what if could attach statistics for:
- Expense of prosecution
- Likelihood of appeal
- Likelihood of appeal
- Average prison sentence

Anything that could be used to measure the effectiveness of the law.