21 February—Joseph Margulies is a professor of law and government at Cornell. He’s a regular commentator on Justia.com’s “Verdict” blog. Seldom do I take exception to his expressed opinions. But yesterday, Wow!

In an essay titled “The Hardest Question” Professor Margulies comments positively—make that enthusiastically—on “a new report by The Sentencing Project [TSP] in support of their longstanding campaign to reduce the maximum prison sentence in the United States to 20 years ‘and shifting sentences for all other offenses proportionally downward, including by decriminalizing some acts, . . . a vital decarceration strategy to arrive at a system that values human dignity and prioritizes racial equity.’”

The good professor realizes that TSP’s desideratum poses some substantive problems and promises to “share [his] solution to this conundrum” in his next essay. Pending his solution, then, before commenting on the sheer asininity of TSP’s strategy, I went to SentencingProject.org’s slick website to see what Joe left out.

So what did Joe leave out? Not much besides expanding—I’d say restoring—ex-cons’ voting rights. I fully approve of that. The (former) felons have served their sentences, paid their penance, after all, so they should have full citizenship rights restored, not limited to voting. Fair is fair, right is right, rights are rights.

The agencies that run slammers are called departments of correction euphemistically, to be sure, but also because—in theory, anyway—the intent is to correct the criminals’ wicked ways as they’re being punished. So shouldn’t they have been corrected before being sprung? Everybody knows that in real life it doesn’t work out that way, so do TSP and Joe Margulies really expect it to work their way, by reducing sentences and decriminalizing crimes? Get real.

I don’t care how well TSP documents its opinion about the necessity and humaneness of a 20-year sentence cap and most of the other Utopian adjustments to criminal justice it’s pushing. The very idea is off-putting, to say the least, as well as unrealistic.

Just over a year ago, in Rewards of mass murder, I excoriated Norway for its vaunted maximum prison sentence of 21 years while alluding to legendary Scandinavian penal leniency.

Just under seven years ago, after the Connecticut Supreme Court put an ill considered but politically expedient end to the state’s death penalty, I wrote in the Republican-American, “Well, it looks like a bare majority of Connecticut’s august Supreme Court justices has reminded us yet again that in our screwed-up state, murder victims and their survivors don’t count nearly as much as murderers.”

That patently shameful upside-down state of affairs sheds crocodile tears for victims of crimes while providing minimal (if any) actual compensation and reparation, even as it mercifully showers concern and usually undeserved sympathy on perpetrators of crimes—unless, of course, the victims are black and the perpetrators are police of any color.

Joe Margulies and TSP are also playing the race card by promoting what they tout as “a system that values human dignity and prioritizes racial equity.” But that’s a given, since the proportion of non-white criminals (incarcerated or otherwise) heavily outweighs that of white criminals. And we all know that the anti-woke racial imbalance can only be the fault of society, never of the criminals.

More after Professor Margulies reveals his solution to the conundrum . . .