A Federal Judge on US Sentencing Guidelines

choi

Michael Ponsor, The Prisoners I Lose Sleep Over. Sentencing guidelines forced me to send them away. Now there's a chance to make things right. Wall Street Journal, Feb 13, 2014 (op-ed).
online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304680904579365440971531708

first five paragraphs:

"The Senate Judiciary Committee approved the 'Smarter Sentencing Act' by a bipartisan vote of 13-5 on Jan 30, sending it to the Senate floor. The legislation is excellent and its passage would mean a long overdue correction of a misguided sentencing regime that Americans—including federal judges like me—have struggled with for more than two decades.

"I've been on the federal bench for 30 years, having served 10 years as a magistrate judge and 20 as a US district judge. My pride in our constitutional system runs bone deep: No system of law has ever existed that tries so hard to be truly fair. I can take scant pride, however, in the dark epoch our criminal sentencing laws have passed through during my decades handling felony cases.

"In 1984, at the start of my career, 188 people were imprisoned for every 100,000 inhabitants of the United States. Other Western industrialized countries had roughly equal numbers. By 2010 that figure had skyrocketed to 497 people imprisoned in the US for every 100,000 inhabitants. Today, we imprison more of our people than any other country in the world.

"How did 'the land of the free and the home of the brave' become the world's biggest prison ward? The US now houses 5% of the world's population and 25% of its prisoners. Either our fellow Americans are far more dangerous than the citizens of any other country, or something is seriously out of whack in the criminal-justice system.

"The capricious evolution of federal sentencing law makes the moral implications of this mass incarceration especially appalling. In 1987, all federal sentencing became subject to sentencing guidelines designed to smooth out disparities among sentences of different judges. This move was not in itself a bad thing; sentences for similarly situated offenders obviously ought to be roughly the same. The problem was that the appellate courts interpreted these guidelines so rigidly that judges like me were often forced to ignore individual circumstances and hit defendants with excessive—sometimes grossly excessive—sentences.

My comment:
(a) There is no need to read the rest, which is about evolution of federal sentencing guidelines in the past three decades.
(b) This essay is about federal sentencing only, having nothing to do with state sentencing. The latter also incarcerates more than before.
(c) Quotations 2 and 3 are statistics on inmates of both federal and state penitentiaries.

(d) At the end of the essay is an introduction: "Mr Ponsor is a senior US district judge in Sprinfield, Mass. He is the author of the novel 'The Hanging Judge' (Open Road Media, 2013)."
(i) The word "senior" in federal judiciary signifies he is semi-retired: meaning he still presides cases but his case load is about half of a regular judge's.
(ii) Some large states are composed of multiple districts. (New York State has four districts, for instance--Manhattan itself constitute Southern District of New York.) But the entire Massachusetts is one district, with one district each sitting in Worcester and Springfield (the rest in Boston). Because Judge Ponsor is permanently assigned to Springfield, I have had no case before him.