BY THE GRACE OF BTINTERNET (ET AL) THE MONITOR MADE IT THROUGH TO ALL EMAIL RECIPIENTS YESTERDAY.

13 March—Remember “Coddling Criminals” from 21 February, in which I took exception to Professor Joseph Margulies’s pipe dream of reducing maximum prison sentences to 20 years, downgrading sentences for all other offenses proportionally, and even decriminalizing some crimes, “to arrive at a system that values human dignity and prioritizes racial equity,” as Joe quotes the Sentencing Project [TSP]?

I ended the essay by promising more after Joe revealed his solution to the conundrum, as he called it. Well, Prof. Margulies revealed his solution last week and here’s my more:

Joe’s solution to the “challenge of reconciling the visceral desire for extreme punishment after a truly horrific crime, and the sober truth that as a rule, sentences are needlessly cruel” is really nothing new. His prescription in essence is that judges should decide each case on its own merits and each criminal on his own merits and potential for going straight.

Prof. Margulies implies that mandatory minimum sentences are counterproductive and just plain wrong. Joe is absolutely right. And he may well have a point that people “age out of crime” and that excessively long sentences may indeed be pointless. (I tend to write excessively long, complex—so-called Latinate—sentences myself, which many people find rather punitive, if never totally pointless.)

But it’s open to question whether people do actually age out of crime on either side of the bars. Connecticut’s own website tells us, although with no breakdown of age, “that within five years of their release, 79 percent were re-arrested, 69 percent were convicted of a new crime, and 50 percent were returned to prison with a new sentence.

“The study also found that 50 percent of the offender group had served at least one sentence for violating the terms of their probation, 46 percent had served time in prison for a drug charge and 19 percent had served a prior sentence for driving under the influence or alcohol or drugs.” Recidivism writ large. And the real world.

While criminal careers tend to be short for a number of reasons, younger brains are known to be more crime-prone. Lawbreaking tends to drop off after age 25. “By the time they reach their 50s,” Joe writes, “people are simply less likely to be violent.” Sure, but what about non-violent crimes that ruin victims’ lives? The bottom line, then, is that there are lots and lots of older criminals of all sorts still committing crimes in their maturity and dotage.

And then Joe has to bring racial disparities and equity into the argument. Unfortunately for woke apologists and equity enthusiasts, it’s an undisputed fact that people of color are more likely to commit crimes than people not of color. But of course it’s not their fault. And it’s society’s fault that they’re more likely to be caught.

Joe Margulies believes, along with TSP, “that the only condition that justifies a sentence longer than 20 years is an ongoing threat to public safety, to be determined after that sentence has been served. Only when we can reliably and objectively predict that a person will continue to be a danger to the public can society justify incarceration beyond 20 years. Long-term incarceration should be based on a prediction about the future, not a judgment about the past.”

Okay. So what exactly constitutes public safety, a danger to the public? Surely it’s more than just violence. So how far should retributive justice—and eye for an eye—go? Joe is opposed to capital punishment, of course. But would he be confident that a body of perceived experts couldn’t be fooled by a personable serial killer or a super-slick con man, say, just waiting to ply his expertise once he got himself sprung? Even after two decades?

Unless I missed something, nowhere in his essay does Prof. Margulies consider the victims. (Kind of like the State of Connecticut except where firearms are concerned.) He emphasizes that his system of sentencing must be “administered honestly and fairly” for it to work. Bless him. That’s a given. But when human nature, judgement, emotion, and politics are involved, it’s also a pipe dream . . .