Finished reading about the Guidelines on Friday or Saturday (I find remembering dates and days is getting harder), and a part of me managed to get pissed off. Not at my situation - I remain thoroughly embarrassed that I remain alive and therefore a bother to many, many people.
All right, a bit of a set-up: 1) federal criminal sentencing law does not generally allow for probation; 2) federal criminal sentencing law does not generally allow for alternate imprisonment.
Another bit of a set-up, the sentencing guidelines have this numbering scale up and down to figure out what sort of sentence a person gets. One thing that gives me a credit of 2 (if memory serves) is what help I give to the federal government.
Is the problem not clear? Once I'm sentenced, I become property of the Federal Bureau of Prisons and on my way to prison.
I am sure that sounds like a pretty fine punishment. However, if I were in state court, I would expect an offer to turn confidential informant or a sentence to include community service as part of probation. So what I could contribute as penance for my wrong doing becomes cut off in a rush for punishment.
This is where I started to get really pissed off -so I will be sitting in prison useless when there might be something useful I could do for my community. Removed from the economy, but now a cost upon the federal budget. I really ought to have been allowed to suicide.
A friend asked me why it is so, and I said our politics require politicians to be "tough" on crime. Make everyone go to prison. Make them go to prison for a very long time. Politicians can brag about protecting us. Prosecutors ca point to their conviction rate when tie comes for job evaluations - or when they decide to become politicians.
The reality is a load of crap.
I doubt the federal prison is any less a training ground for career criminals than Indiana's prisons. I expect to be tossed into a cesspit run by some combination of Aryan Brotherhood, African-American, and Mexican gangs. [To be fair, the reality was there were groups running things - we called them cars - but it was not overt, in say, the way of all too many movies. As for training criminals, I think now that was true except for those who had the imagination and skills to find an alternative to criminality; this was extremely rare as little opportunity was provided to find any such alternatives. sch 9/23/22] (That I truly expect any of these groups to stick a shiv in me is actually less of a bother than the thought of defecating without any privacy.)
The idea that we protect ourselves by ratcheting up sentences is nonsense. I do not mix much with the other men I live with, but I can see others mixing. Things are taught and connections made. The same happens in prison. These people are home in this environment - the outside is the strange land. Kind of makes deterrence a nullity when they prefer being inside, when they may prefer being inside, that imprisonment has been accepted as part of life.
[Nothing happened during my time in the tender embrace of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, which makes me think a single word of the preceding paragraph needs corrected. sch 9/23/22.]
No, the politicians sold us a bill of goods. Just as we were sold a line on supply-side economics and WMDs and ever so much else. We mistook placebos for miracle cures. We thought we could have paradise without sacrifice. As we have done with almost every public issue, we took the easy way out. Those politicians that did not trouble us with reality, we kept i office. Then some of us woke up, then more of us, but we do not want to face the real villain in this country's politics - us.
sch
[Part two will show up here tomorrow. You can read the Sentencing Guidelines here. I suggest anyone and everyone read the introduction. I did not do so until I had been a while in prison. The process seemed, to me, spreadsheet justice. It does not question if the length of sentences that went into the calculations actually served the public good. sch 9/23/27]
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