Almost everybody loves to whine about criminals getting off easy. That's all he got? Four years? Five years? Twenty years? It's not enough. They should lock him up for life. No wonder there's so much crime!
I don't know of any divine tablet or sacred spreadsheet that tells us what a "light" sentence is or what is a sufficient punishment for, say, a burglary, or an assault, or a rape. People routinely act as if they know but they usually only say it should be more than what it was. Always more. If you asked someone out of the blue how many years in prison a man should serve for, say, rape, I doubt that most people have a clue as to how to arrive at a particular number.
How long should a man serve for conning people out of money? 144 years?
The most useful measure, in my opinion, is the relative seriousness of a crime. There, we are on firmer ground, though not in the clear.
What types of crime are there?
There should never be any punishment for thought crimes. You would think that would be obvious-- I would have thought it would be obvious-- but in the so-called war on terror, the U.S. is now locking up young men for talking about jihad even if they cannot be shown to have taken a single actual step towards committing an act of terrorism. Talking about a crime is not a crime unless you commit the crime. Talking about using drugs without using drugs is not illegal. Talking about having sex without having sex is not illegal. But talking about jihad without doing any jihad will get you 20 years, especially if an enthusiastic FBI informant offers to supply you with guns and bombs.
There are "victimless" crimes like possession of drugs for personal use, prostitution, possession of pornography (which, under the Canadian criminal code, used to include depictions of homosexual acts). When people try to justify prosecution for these crimes they frequently give, as reasons, consequences that are already illegal under other laws: driving while drunk, assault, exploitation of minors. But if a man (or a woman) uses threats of physical violence to force another person into acts of prostitution, I believe he or she should be prosecuted for a) exploitation (taking the money earned by someone else's forced labour) or b) assault. But if two independent adults agree to have sex with each other in exchange for money, the government should stay out of it. Drugs, like alcohol, should be a controlled substance. The government has no business telling anyone they can't grow a particular plant and then stick its leaves in their mouths and set them on fire. As long as they don't get behind the wheel of a car.
There are property crimes. I think there should be a big difference between the punishment for property crimes and the punishment for crimes of violence. And I think the punishment for property crimes should be focussed on restitution, not on revenge.
My point is there are no
Crimes of violence should be taken very seriously, and repeat offenders should receive escalating sentences. This is one area where I have some sympathy for victims' rights organizations-- with limitations. Quite often, we hear mythical tales of someone who committed numerous violent acts and kept getting released after light sentences. In many instances, the story is more complicated than that: our judges are not stupid.
Capital Punishment is absurd: if we really believe that life is sacred and the taking of a life is a horrible offense, the last message we want to send to society is that we will do it too. Besides, as DNA testing has shown, we are all too frequently wrong in determining who committed the crime.
Unfortunately, what has happened in the U.S. is a ratcheting up of criminal sentencing. And the word "ratcheting" is exactly what I mean. A ratchet, if you don't know, is a box wrench on a handle that can be switched to allow the user to quickly turn the handle back and forth while applying force in one direction only. In the U.S., over the last forty years, there has been constant political pressure to lengthen sentences without the slightest movement backwards. It has become politically impossible--thanks to the "tough on crime" wing of the Republican party-- to advocate for lighter sentences for anything (though there are signs the U.S. is coming to their senses on the issue). As a result, sentences for some crimes in the U.S. have moved beyond severe to ridiculous and then to the sadistic and finally absurd. Yes, there are people in federal prisons in the U.S. serving 20-25 years for possession of marijuana. If you're a rational person, you probably don't believe me.
The benchmark sentence for violent crime should be 25 years for murder and there should be a chance of parole after 15 years. Hey, I can be specific. And you can quibble all you like about the exact number, but believe that 25 is a rational, reasonable guess as to how much is appropriate and constructive. I believe that even a murderer should have some hope of being released some day if only to provide him with an incentive to change his life while in prison. Prison guards will tell you that it is not helpful for a prisoner to know that he will never be released no matter what his behavior is like, in prison.
Scale that down to three months for a basic assault that does not include sufficient violence to inflict permanent injury to the victim for a person who is a repeat offender. It seems rational to me to give suspended sentences to first-time offenders in this category, particularly if they take steps to turn their lives around, especially making personal, public apologies and restitution.
The rest I will leave alone-- it would take years of work and analysis and practise to develop a useful, sensible scale of appropriate punishments for violent crimes that fall in between murder and assault. Hey, we have that: it's called the criminal justice system. It needs to be fixed, within parameters like the ones I suggest above, but it's possible, because we do still have the miracle of rule by law.
Picture
There was a time when justice was simple: if someone wronged you, you wronged him back. If someone murdered your child or your father or your brother, you murdered him, and maybe some of his friends and family if they stood in the way. If someone took your girl, you took his life. If someone took your food, you beat him to a pulp. Brawls. Blood feuds. Civil wars.
The problem was that it often became quite murky as to where the center of gravity was in these sometimes long sequences of actions and responses. We humans are very good at rationalizing away our own culpabilities and investing our own actions with some kind of obscure virtue or wisdom that others may not apprehend. We seek revenge and won't hesitate to extract more punishment than might be deserved, to satisfy a craving that is not about the health of a community or some kind of "balance" to human affairs: we want to see them suffer. We want to be seen as the wronged victim because nothing makes you seem more righteous or virtuous than being able to point at someone else who is very, very bad. You thereby entitled to do the crime he or she did, to them, or even more, because it is so outrageous that virtuous, innocent you, was wronged by them.
But years of experience taught people that these kind of blood-feuds only led to disaster, to wars, to destruction, to division and acrimony. Can anyone imagine these disputes ever ending with, "oh, all right, I guess now we're even"? We're never even: your revenge was always somehow excessive or unjustified or came at the wrong time.
It is one of the greatest miracles of civilization: rule of law. The idea that crimes should be addressed by the community, not by the wronged party, and that the appropriate punishment should be decided by neutral third parties, not by the relatives or friends of the victim. This was progress: the wiser heads in a community saw that allowing individuals to take revenge for crimes committed against them led to instability and factionalism and hatred and ended up destroying everyone. And the wiser heads prevailed, in the West, at least, in the Magna Carta, and democracy and law and the courts and impartial judges.
Where did it come from? Probably from the idea of God, of something greater than ourselves, who alone was entitled to judge and exact punishment. Try as you might to locate the idea in "natural law", it's hard to make the leap to transcendence. Especially once you realize that the oft-cited "eye for an eye" is, in fact, the opposite of Christ's teachings.
But it's hard to shake those old instincts. And it's hard for a lot of people to look beyond their own grievances towards what is good for society in the long term. Over and over again, you hear people insist that a particular sentence given by a court is not enough. He got off lightly. We need tougher sentencing. We need to bring back capital punishment: murdering someone is so wrong, we ought to murder him.
And so we have the victims rights movement. I heard two representatives talking on the CBC this morning. They really feel it is just awful that we have this "rule of law" thing (though they would never put it that way) and that the victims of a crime don't get to pick out the punishment. No, they would never put it that way: instead they insist that our criminal justice system doesn't pay enough attention to the victims of crime-- it's always only about the offender, and they are right sick of it.
You might be excused for thinking for a moment that people don't go to jail anymore and that victims rights advocates are doing nothing more than trying to see to it that wrongdoers are punished.
They will never, ever use the word "revenge", except, to deny that that is what they really want.
They will say that what they want is a role in the criminal prosecution of the perpetrator. In other words, exactly what it is that our civilization decided long ago was a bad idea.
The primary virtue of rule of law is precisely the opposite of what they want: personal justice. Over the centuries, we have invested enormous resources into a system that is impersonal and objective and rational. It could do better at all of these things but whatever it's faults it tries to take into consideration the long-term interests of the community, and a degree of compassion and reason and interest in rehabilitation are all int he long term interests of the community.