aviel wrote:The United States has the highest prison population in the world, and the approximately the highest per capita prison population in the world. This is despite the fact that we don't at all have the highest rate of convictions in the world -- meaning that our high incarceration rate is due, at least in part, to the unusual length of our sentences. So, when advocating a longer sentence, you have to overcome a substantial presumption that the original sentence is too long already.
Disagreed.
I will grant you the assumption that US sentences are too long, though I'll note that the only reason given for that is the fact that they're higher than other countries, which is hardly an objective scale.
An overall high sentence rate may not apply equally in all cases. Drug offenses, forming a significant portion of criminal convictions and around 20% of prison inmates according to your source, are infamous for being vastly oversentenced, but other misguided attempts to apply the 'broken window'-theory have led to higher sentences for other low-level crimes like petty theft and vandalism. Sexual assault, by contrast, has a particular history of being underprosecuted, underconvicted, and undersentenced. Although that, on the whole, has changed a lot for the better (I recall reading that the UK overall gives equal sentences for rape and manslaughter), we should at least be careful in assuming a general trend will apply to all criminal offenses.
Secondly, if I were to grant the assumption that the average rape sentence is too long, the average rape sentence without prior sexual assault convictions lies in the ballpark of 80 months, with around half that on average served, compared to the 6 in this case. The mere fact that on average sentences may be high doesn't make that one has to look at a sentence that with minor accomodations wouldn't interfere with a school year and assume it's too high, merely because that's a trend that applies to all crimes. Of course such a sentence could be justified by circumstances (even be high considering circumstances), but following that path it's not illogical to seek justification for an unusually low sentence, not assume a high one.
SandTea wrote:aviel wrote:I don't understand this argument. How would longer sentencing him to longer than six months solve any of these problems? As far as I know, a longer sentence wouldn't make him more willing to repent afterwards, wouldn't make him less likely to offend in the future,
It would stop a rapist from raping for longer.
To SandTea: You think no rape occurs in prison?
To aviel: We can say that of any sentence of any lenght, as well as the idea of prison in and of itself. There are the aspects of prevention (overly short sentencing will rob the justice system of their preventive effect) and even signalling (a very short sentence can be interpreted as the legal system marking this as not a big deal). There's a long debate that can be had about the point of prisons. I'll back Carrie's question: what would you say is appropriate?