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"Is 500 serious crimes worth the freedom of 50,000 offenders? That's my question."

By Douglas A. Berman

At the end of a lengthy debate in the comments to an earlier post, frequent commentor "federalist" tees up a great question that goes to the heart of the challenges facing all sentencing reform efforts.  The question federalist poses is the question in the title of this post, and I wanted to set it out in this new post so that it could be discussed and debated in a fresh setting.  My students know that I say that the right answer to every good question is "it depends," and I think that this is the right answer to federalist's great question.  First, of course, we need some sense of what "serious" crimes are hypothetically being prevented by denying freedom 50,000 offenders.  I think most everyone would say that heroin dealing and downloading child porn and illegal dogfighting and mortgage fraud and perjury and domestic violence are all serious crimes, and yet I suspect few would endorse trading off freedom for 50,000 offenders to prevent 500 of these kinds of "serious" crimes...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on May 22, 2009 (boomark / email).