Good point.
Mandatory sentencing will take the courts to the same place that No tolerance has taken schools to. It leaves no room for common sense, especially in a system where prosecutors make their careers on how many big convictions they get.
In your system where is the tolerance for the woman who killed her husband after years of documented abuse. Where is the tolerance for the 18-year-old retarded boy who slaps someone who has been harassing him?
As it is the mandatory sentences in place for drugs hardly ever affect the nice affluent kid from the suburbs. When they get pulled over for an ounce of marijuana the charge is never filed because they are just kids, but an inner city kid with a joint gets the full range of charges available to the prosecutor thrown at him, then when he gets done with that, if he ever gets his life back under control he can’t get student loans because he has a federal record.
Mandatory sentences as they are currently being used give all the discretion to the prosecuting Attorney and none to the Judge, and while I can see that some judges are putzes, the answer is to get rid of them not break the whole system to fix a couple broken links.
In the first case, the tolerance comes about in the type of prison, the requirements for rehabilitation, and the time before parole hearings start. There are no minimum sentences here, the woman could be sentenced to life in minimum security with parole hearings every year or less. That seems to me to give a lot of discretion to the judge. In the second case, that does not sound like felony assault, so the kid would not be sentenced here.
No convict would serve any more time than they did in the old system if they make a serious effort at rehabilitation. But this method gives the mechanism to ensure that violent offenders who make no attempt at rehabilitation will not be able to leave.
Roughly 85% to 95% percent of all cases are plea bargains between DA’s and defense attorneys. If you make mandatory life sentences in all crimes of violence, the number of tjhem that are plea bargained will drop to 0% and 100% of crimes of violence will be jury trials instead. This will be a huge burden on the courts, district attorney’s offices, and public defender/court appointed attorney’s offices, and that burden will be paid for by the taxpayers. You’ve taken away the incentive to plead guilty, so why shouldn’t they take it to court and maybe get an acquittal?
Not only that, since you’ve now made mandatory life sentences in all crimes of violence except misdemeanors, the only way a DA can offer a plea is to knock a felony down to misdemeanor, which they will have to start doing a awful lot. So you paradoxically end up with fewer people actually being convicted of felonies for crimes of violence than you would otherwise.
Not only not only that, you’ve now taken the power to determine how long somebody should actually spend in prison away from their judge and jury and given it to a parole board with no guidelines to length of sentence except seeing how the prisoner has behaved since he’s been incarcerated. Are there mandatory minimums for repeat offenders or particularly egregious crimes? Is the seriousness of the crime a factor in the parole board hearing? Does the parole board evaluate the seriousness of the crime and assess punishment appropriately instead of a jury? Why shouldn’t a trier of fact do that following a trial?
I think what people are missing in Balduran’s concept is that the vast majority of these “life” convicts will be freed and back on the streets in the same amount of time as today’s “2 year” convicts. The difference is that if these people don’t shape up and fly right, society can put them right back in, or not let them back out. Currently even if a convict is obviously untrustworthy and intends to commit crimes again, you must let them go at the end of their sentence. The only way to extend a sentence is for them to commit, and be convicted of, a new crime while in prison.
Killing your victims would only serve to push the 2 year parole hearing out to 20 years, not smart. Would you plea bargain? Yes, if it means your first hearing is in 12mo instead of 3 years.
I don’t know if it’s a good idea, but don’t judge it by thinking that the goal is to put all violent offenders in jail forever.
Nope, I did not misread the scheme like that. I know exactly what he meant, but it still does not work. It involves the granting of life sentences, based on what is often an utterly arbitrary distinction between violent and non-violent crime. The fact that someone may be let out earlier does not alter the fact that they have been sentenced to life, and can be kept in prison for that long.
Parole boards are incredibly subjective. Two people, X and Y, may have committed identical crimes, and have identical behavior in prison. However they may end up spending massively different lengths of time in jail under this because of the role of the parole board. If people behave badly in prison, charge them with those crimes, and sentence them for them. Punishing people because we think they might misbehave in the future is problematic. The initial sentence must be justifiable - must not be cruel and unusual punishment. A person who is sentenced to life, with a parole review in 12 months, for a bar fight when someone insults his girlfriend, may well state that he would do exactly the same thing again if the situation is repeated. Under the scheme proposed here, he can never be released - his sentence is life for a push and a shove in a bar. That’s not justice. Parole also requires a person to admit their guilt. Here a person would be prevented from maintaining their innocense while completing their sentence.
Thanks Cheesesteak, you summed up what I was trying to get at very well. I did get the feeling that some people here were focussing too much on the life part of the sentence. When the important part of the sentence, from a practical point of view, is the parole time and rehabilitation requirements. However, maybe that highlights one of the problems of this scheme. There is so much psychological association with life as being the ultimate sentence that the other qualifications would be ignored.
villa it sounds like you have objections from both a practical and a philosophical point of view.
From your practical concerns, I agree there would have to be a fair bit of details to work out for clasification of violent offenses (such as my revised limit to felonies) and inconsistencies of parole boards.
To the first part of this quote, if somebody gets into a fight serious enough to land them a felony charge (not just a push and a shove) over an insult, and would do it again, I feel they are a prime candidate for this system and would have no problem with them staying incarcerated until they smarten up.
I guess I don’t have the same philosophical objections that you do, that keeping someone in prison indefinately because they refuse to rehabilitate is punishing them for crimes yet to be comitted. Firstly because it is already done to a certain degree when somebody gets say 25 years with parole in 10 years. And secondly I feel that when someone has been put in prison it is now their duty to convince us they are worthy to be let out.
I do agree with your point that maintaining your innocence is problematic in this system. A real difficulty if you really are innocent. Don’t know how you could safeguard for that other than appeals processes.
Well, if the person is in prison instead of on the streets, then he can’t commit crimes against people in general society. Quite a few criminals commit crimes once they are released. In theory, under the proposed system, these criminals would never have the chance to re-offend.
Poverty certainly does not cause crime. There are plenty of poor people who manage to obey the law, and plenty of rich people who break it. People break the law because they choose to do so, for whatever reason, and no societal forces made them do so. The responsibility is theirs, and theirs alone.
Getting charged with a felony for an assault ain’t as hard as you might think, especially if your face doesn’t fit.
As for your second point, you don’t undertsand what I am saying. It is NOT done to a certain extent now. To sentence someone to 25 years, with parole possible in 10, is only possible if the crime they have committed warrants a sentence of 25 years. This requires the possibility that a person will be kept in prison for life for a crime that only carries a legitimate tariff of one year, for example. Even withot committing any further offense, they can be imprisoned for what we think they might do in the future. That’s both unconstitutional and unjust.
There are plenty of people who smoke and don’t get lung cancer. Does that mean tobacco doesn’t cause lung cancer?
If poverty doesn’t cause crime, that why are crime rates so much higher in poor areas than in rich areas? A guy who makes a million dollars a year has no reason to try robbing a liquor store for five thousand dollars. A guy who make no money has plenty of reason to do so. To reduce crime, reduce poverty. It’s that simple.
Correlation is not causation. Perhaps the same reason that people are poor is the same reason they commit crime – their desire to get ahead in the world without working, their failure to consider consequences for their actions, their inability to control their drinking and drug use, etc. I’ll freely admit that more poor people commit crime than rich people, but I disagree that they commit crimes because they are poor.
Maybe, but I’d say that the person who’s making a million dollars has a good work ethic, plans for the future, and has other values that make it unlikely that he’d rob a liquor store, no matter how much money he has. People don’t rob stores because they are poor; they rob stores because they have a skewed set of values. And the reason many people are poor is because they also have a skewed set of values.
The U.S. has an extensive web of anti-poverty programs. Anyone in our nation, if they desire it, can have a home, food, and the basics of life. Has this reduced our crime rate? No. On the contrary, we’ve seen our crime rate go up since we inaugurated the “war on poverty.” Poverty isn’t the problem.