At a guess, I bet the register has large fractions of serious criminals and also your "rare" edge cases. The probability that someone doing one of these minor

At a guess, I bet the register has large fractions of serious criminals and also your "rare" edge cases. The probability that someone doing one of these minor things getting on the register might be low. But the number of people doing them in the first place will roughly compensate. Anyway, laws where there is a low probability of a serious (and over the top) punishment are bad. For one thing they don't work well as incentives. Worse, they are most likely to hit the disadvantaged, low status people who have less leverage to officials to look the other way.