Gamely Justifying Sentences Everyone Else Thinks Are Wrong

Meet the kind of person opposing bipartisan prison reforms.

President Obama has been on a big push to reform the criminal justice system in the last few days. He commuted 46 sentences of folks in prison for nonviolent drug crimes. He’s made some big speeches. He even visited a federal prison and, in a way that would be surprising if you remember that he is a former Illinois State Senator, not as an inmate.

In general, Obama’s approach has been warmly received, and DOJ is working with folks on the Hill to get a bipartisan bill through Congress by the end of the year. It probably doesn’t go far enough, but at least it goes.

So everyone’s happy, right? Who could possibly oppose these humane reforms with bipartisan support?

Federal prosecutors, that’s who.

Yup, the very same people who have built their careers on putting other humans in cages are opposed to any changes to America’s human caging practices.

Steve Cook, the President of the National Association of Assistant U.S. Attorneys said “at a lightly attended event in the nation’s capital” that if we send fewer people to prison the crime rate would rise.

Here’s his argument: if prosecutors can’t threaten people with really long draconian sentences, then they won’t be able to extract information from them to make other cases against other people. So, since those other people won’t be prosecuted, the crime rate will go up.

Sponsored

I have three responses:

(1) Doesn’t the government have other ways to make cases than with snitches? I seem to remember a whole lot of evidence they’ve been able to develop in a whole lot of other ways. Is our entire law enforcement apparatus based on snitches? If we didn’t have cooperators, would society slowly descend into anarchy? I’m kind of thinking no, but I don’t have the same insider’s view as the folks at the National Association of Assistant U.S. Attorneys.

(2) More fundamentally, shouldn’t the government worry about whether the sentences for all the people it asks a judge to send to prison are fair — regardless of the utilitarian value of unfair sentences? Is threatening someone with a cruelly long time away from their family, with no sex, little control over their physical movements, almost no privacy, and really bad food, just so that you can go after someone else kind of creepy? Isn’t that the logic of the torturer?

(3) Mr. Cook seems to think that there wouldn’t be any cooperation if prison sentences were shorter because people would just say “ok” to a small amount of prison time. Probably not. My sense is that the amount of prison time most people want is none. People will flip to avoid any prison time. And, though it’s rare for DOJ to do this, people will also flip to avoid a criminal prosecution in the first place.

Just because you’re used to threatening people with an AK-47, doesn’t mean that a pistol wouldn’t also work.

Sponsored

What I find most depressing about this reaction is how it ignores how we look compared to the rest of the world.

Check out this lovely piece on our sentencing practices and the need for across the board sentencing reform.

We lock up 725 people out of every 100,000. If you take drug offenders out of the picture, we lock up 625 per 100,000.

Does Australia have a crime problem? They lock up only 151 people per 100,000. How about Portugal? 137. Belgium locks up only 105 per 100,000. Those lawless Irish lock up only 82 people per 100,000.

If there’s one conclusion to pull from an international comparison about crime, it’s that Americans are more excited about prison as we are about guns, apple pie, and, apparently, Donald Trump.

Yet it’s also clear that locking up more people doesn’t make the crime rate drop. I think there’s a decent argument that the opposite is true.

So why does the National Association of Assistant United States Attorneys think we need to lock up a lot of people? I wrote about some of the psychological stuff behind this before, but one good reason is that if we have fewer people going to prison, we may have fewer dollars flowing to U.S. Attorneys Offices.

And those “lightly attended event[s]” may become very lightly attended indeed.

Earlier: Why Judges and Prosecutors Don’t Care If They’re Right