Do Not Pass Go

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

When I was a lad, there were about two hundred thousand Americans rotting in our jails and prisons.

Today we’re headed toward two and a half million. Nearly twelve times that of my callow youth. It isn’t the population: not even twice as many of us today as when I was a lad. Nor the crime rate.

But a quarter of the entire world’s prisoners reside in the land of the free.

We’ve got prisons for everyone. State prisons. Federal prisons. Juvenile correction facilities. Local jails. Immigration detention facilities. Indian Country jails. Military prisons. Civil commitment centers. State psychiatric hospitals. In all fifty states and beyond. We even stack them up in Pago Pago (that’s where I’d want to go, if there’s a window with a view).

So we’re pretty good at punishing our people. We’re certainly better at it than the rest of the world. The average criminal sentence in the United States is nearly sixteen times longer than our closest neighbor, Canada, ten times longer than Germany, six times longer than Finland, five times longer than England and Wales, while not quite two times longer than Australia, which was founded as a penal colony yet still lags as punisher next to us.

Australia and England punish its murderers with sentences eight years on average shorter than the United States (twenty-one years); Sweden, fifteen years shorter.

The murderer Derek Chauvin got twenty-two and a half years for killing George Floyd. Many felt that wasn’t enough.

He leaned a knee into a helpless man’s neck till he couldn’t breathe, till his heart couldn’t beat, and longer yet just to show the horrified crowd who was in charge. At sentencing he offered condolences to the family as if it was a shame Floyd died but what could he do about it.

But, for the crime for which he was convicted, of murder he did not intend, twenty-two and a half years is hardly a slap on the wrist. It is not the forty-year maximum he might have received, not the thirty years the prosecutor asked, but also not the ten years and eight months possible under Minnesota sentencing guidelines, and certainly not the time served the idiot defense lawyer humbly requested.

The question oughtn’t be, should Chauvin and people like him be serving longer sentences.

The question is, with so much of America imprisoned, do longer sentences serve us.