The criticism is unfair because everyone acknowledges that you can't throw every 17 year old scumbag in prison for life. If everyone whose jacket looked like the jacket of a potential murderer before his first murder got a life sentence, we'd have to build 100+ story prison skyscrapers in every county.
The tools do not exist to definitively identify these crooks before they do something this horrible. Handing out a life sentence for every felony is not an acceptable alternative.
It might be.
Allow me to use an example from an unrelated field (other than that it is also the .gov at work): Highways. Roads are designed to handle a certain capacity in terms of number of vehicles per unit of time, usually expressed in vehicles-per-hour. Let's say a road was built a number of years ago for a maximum design capacity of 5000 vehicles per hour. The population of the surrounding area grows, and the peak load of the road now hits 7500 vehicles per hour at peak ... resulting in extensive gridlock during hours of peak travel (think: Washington DC beltway, for example).
So here's where the trickery comes in. The urban, regional, and transportation planners claim that because peak load increased from less than 5000 vehicles per hour to 7500 VPH over the last 20 years, over the next 20 years the load
will increase by a like percentage, to 11,250 VPH.
Therefore (they say)
we MUST rebuild the road to accommodate this expected increase in traffic.But, as we know from
Field of Dreams, "If you build it, they will come." The converse, of course, is that if you DON'T build it ... they won't come. If the road in question is gridlocked at 7500 vehicles per hour, it by definition cannot handle a 50 percent increase, and therefore unless they build a new road, the "projected" 50 percent increase simply won't happen ... for the simple reason that people won't choose to live in a place where they can't get to and from work. The projections become self-fulfilling, because the planners and engineers create the infrastructure that allows it to take place.
Now consider how that applies to prisons. The bleeding hearts say, "But we can't build enough prisons to hold ALL those violent felons. Look how many there are."
Yeah, BUT ... we have to stop and consider that the current criminal mindset is based on "If you can't do the time, don't do the crime." If they
know they can engage in armed robbery and get off (IF caught) with 5 to 10 years, and be out on parole within three ... it's worth the risk. If the sentences were stiffer and there was no provision for parole before the term of the sentence was completed -- you have to wonder if some of those smart guys might not stop and reassess if it's really worth taking a chance at knocking over a convenience store for a hundred bucks when the penalty if caught is a guaranteed 25 to 50 years in the joint.
In my opinion, there is simply no way to model this. Just making a simple-minded projection based on the current number of felons who choose to be felons because of the current sentencing structure cannot be extrapolated with any reliabiluty to predict the potential prison population if a significantly stricter penalty system were to be put in place. But the current arguments in favor of shorter, lighter sentences AND fewer prison beds don't make any sense at all, and obviously aren't working.
