I wish I could convince everyone that prison sentences in America are, across the board, way too long. All of them. Even the ones for crimes you personally think are unusually heinous. The nickel version of the argument goes like this:
- Since the early '80s we've basically doubled sentences and doubled them again.
- That was an overreaction, though to a genuine crime wave. The first doubling was arguably justified. The second wasn't.
- Extremely long sentences barely affect crime at all, especially the very longest sentences. They have virtually no additional deterrent effect, and since people age out of crime it does almost no good to keep them in prison past their mid-30s. However, long sentences do ruin lives and cost taxpayers a lot of money.
- Both common sense and common decency point the same way: pretty much every prison sentence in America should be cut in half or close to it.
Many liberals are open to this argument except when it's for something they especially disapprove of. But that's wrong. If you believe that we over-punish, then we should stop doing it. For everyone.
Take the kerfuffle over Joe Biden's mass commutation of sentences for prisoners who were released to home confinement during COVID and have had clean records ever since. It so happens that one of the commutations ended up going to Michael Conahan, the notorious "kids for cash" judge in Pennsylvania who sent thousands of teens to a for-profit prison in return for kickbacks. After being caught he was sentenced to 17 years in prison. He had served 14 of those years when the balance of his sentence was commuted.
17 years! The fact that this probably didn't shock you shows just how inured we've become to ever more absurd sentencing. That's a massive sentence, even for a monstrous crime—and so is 14 years. It never should have been more than ten years at most in the first place, especially for someone who pled guilty and showed honest remorse.
But everyone is shocked not at the original sentence but at the fact that it got cut from enormously too long to merely way too long. We shouldn't be. Save your shock for the fact that Biden's commutations affected only 1,500 prisoners rather than the 90% of the prison population they should have.
This is a terrible argument that will not convince anyone.
There is nothing wrong with believing that many crimes receive sentences that are too long while also believing that some crimes deserve long sentences. There is no need for maximalist consistency here, it doesn't make sense that there should be.
If you generally believe X, then you MUST ALWAYS believe X in ALL circumstances!! Might be a fun argument on the internet, but the response is just an eye-roll.
Kevin is a robot, so he has to obey his programming. He can’t have exceptions.
To me, for what the judge did, 17 years was light. He should have been put in the stocks and then the families of his victims allowed to beat him to death. Fists and feet only, of course- I’m not a monster.
also, for good measure, every judge in the state should have been made to watch.
I like the way you think.
I tend to agree on this one. He destroyed countless lives and families for personal gain. These weren't victimless crimes. You can't go light on that stuff. It would be like commuting the sentence for Alex Jones.
This is an interesting topic. It is surprising to me that we haven’t come up with a better solution than incarceration for dealing with “bad actors”.
Prison does have the one good feature in that it isolates offenders from the rest of society for a while so that they can’t re-offend.
Kevin is right that the majority of crime is committed by the young. Once people reach their mid thirties or early forties the probability they will reoffend drops. Keeping these people locked up does little to directly reduce the crime rate.
This judge was in his 30's when he committed his crimes.
The type of crime that J. Frank Parnell is talking about is violent street crime. Those type of crimes are pretty much the domain of young people who lack impulse control. This is why Kevin’s Lead Crime Hypothesis is true too.
It's not so much because of lack of self control, but because to commit crimes that have a physical component to it, it becomes a lot harder to commit them when people are already on the slide of their physical capabilities.
Prison has other purposes besides separating criminals from the general population:
1. Retribution
2. A sense of justice for victims (closely related)
3. Deterrence
4. Rehabilitation (although I am very skeptical this works)
Even serial killers? Murderers who tortured their victims? Mutilated the corpse? People who trafficked in humans and children for sex work?
I can think of many people who should rot in prison.
Rehabilitation is always possible, even for the most heinous criminals.
But that's not his thesis. He said all sentences across the board are excessive.
Crimes can be horrific and sentences can be too long. These two things can both be true.
I'm not saying the two can't be true.
But since you're making the point, please identify which of these categories, which might ordinarily demand life in prison due to aggravating circumstances, should be cut back just because they're too long.
We can go a step further. Does someone who has twice been convicted of murder get to have their sentences automatically reduced?
That's easy, but you're being an asshole:
Accessory murder - especially when the death was not the fault or caused by their actions. A police officer or rival gang member killing their accomplice shouldn't send them to jail forever.
Juvenile cases. Heck, pretty much anything below multiple murder shouldn't get life.
But you know what? Ten years is a damn long time. We shouldn't have many sentences above that except in cases of repeated, multiple victims of rape, murder, kidnapping.
You're taking the easy way out. I'm asking you to pick from the set I selected:
- Serial murderers
- Human traffickers
- Murderers who tortured their victims
- Murderers who mutilated corpses
All respect to TheMelancholyDonkey for tackling the question straightforward. All the insults don't affect me one bit, Crissa. If you don't want to answer, then don't. No one's going to think less of you for not responding.
Why shouldn't accessory murder get you a life term?
If a death is a reasonably foreseeable consequence of your criminal acts why should you get off because you did not pull the trigger?
Some people should never be allowed to live in society. If they aren’t executed they should remain in prison for life. For instance, Theodore Frank, Cary Stayner, Joseph DeAngelo and Lawrence Singleton. Releasing people like that is sentencing some innocent person to death.
I think you have to have some sympathy for Cary Stayner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cary_Stayner
It seems pretty obvious that the trauma from the kidnapping of his brother is what turned Cary Stayner into a monster. You cannot release him as long as he is a threat to everyone else but if it does become possible then there needs to be consideration about why he committed these crimes and the extent of his culpability.
Unfortunately, I believe that some people present a danger to others forever. Some terrorists are like this, some serial killers, some rapists. Forever.
Multiple citations needed.
This is just extremely naive dsngerous wishful thinking. The dangerous part is because if certain people were allowed to go out because "their sentence sentence is too long" or "everyone can be rehabilitated" it would lead to more innocents being hurt or killed by that individual.
That's just weird that you can call it naive, and yet you think keeping people on jail forever solves the problem.
That seems naive.
Certain people do need to be kept locked up forever to protect others, whether in prison or some mental health facilty I don't care as long as they are not out in the community. That's a fact, just as it is a fact that not every person can be rehabilitate. If you want to argue that 90% or whatever number of people should probably have their sentences cut in half I'd agree with you, but there is a remaining percentage of those who absolutely shouldn't. You can't just do blanket reductions across the board without looking at the specific crimes and circumstances of each sentence.
I'll give you an example. A serial killer who targets trans people because he thinks they are abominations from the devil that deserve to be eradicated from the world.
Would you consider someone like that as someone who can be rehabilitated, and would you feel safe if someone like Kevin just decided to cut their sentence in half to let him free just purely out of some love for consistency.
What about someone who mugs people for their wallets and and kills one of them when they fight back?
Or someone who enjoys playing the knockout game with random people?
Or a rapist?
Can you please tell me what categories of violent criminals you think we can safely cut the sentences of in half?
I would disagree. Rehabilitation is possible for most. There are irredeemable pop that society is better off without.
I get Kevin's point that most people grow out of crime in their 30's. You don't see many 45 year old men holding up a convenient store. And yes, most of our sentences are way, way too long. But this was a crime of greed. Pure and simple. Selling thousands of youth into prison for no reason other than he wanted the money.
I'm shocked that it's only 17 years. That person should never be allowed to be in society again. He was a judge. His job was to be fair, honest and administer justice to those kids, but he sold them into prison.
I don't want to live in a world where someone like that is allowed to roam free. There are certain sins you can't atone.
But you can atone for killing someone in a robbery? Or for rape? Or for injuring someone in an assault?
How, exactly? And how is it possible for such people to atone when the jail for bucks judge cannot?
Atonement is not a goal of penology. Deterrence, denunciation, and rehabilitation are the things we should be pursuing, with rehabilitation being top priority.
Even serial killers?
Serial killers are generally mentally ill. They should be hospitalized. If they are not, then, yes, their sentences should be shorter.
Murderers who tortured their victims?
Yes.
Mutilated the corpse?
Yes.
People who trafficked in humans and children for sex work?
Yes.
The important questions do not revolve around what the convicted offender does or does not "deserve." The important question is, "What are we accomplishing?" If the only answer to that question is that it makes us feel better to lock them away forever, then the sentence needs to be shorter.
If your goal is to prevent crime, rather than punishing it*, the huge resources spent keeping these people incarcerated would be far better employed making it more likely that offenders get caught at all.
*This discussion reminds me of when Arthur praised The Tick for helping to stop crime, producing the response, "I don't want to stop crime! I just want to fight it!"
Midwit take.
What if your goal is to--through punishment--affirm societal values and thus reinforce them? Reducing crime to a mere question of Bayesian risk undermines the societal values that initially drove criminalization.
This. I am in favor of reducing the sentences for most property crimes, while vastly increasing them for corporate crime. Wage theft should get you damnatio ad bestias.
This would make it even easier for rich people to commit crimes. We already have the situation where rich people get away with crimes--just look at the orange menace!--while poorer people are incarcerated for far longer than reasonable.
Property crimes on a large scale can cost lives!
Punishment makes people worse people. Punishment increases recidivism. Abuse is not justice.
Multiple citations needed.
What if your goal is to--through punishment--affirm societal values and thus reinforce them?
Then you haven't actually read the data. The evidence is overwhelming that harsher sentences are not effective at reducing crime. See the work of Mark Kleiman.
What acts as a deterrent is the likelihood of getting caught. Shifting resources from long incarceration to catching criminals would do a lot more to affirm societal values.
Who makes the determination that a person is “rehabilitated” and should they have any responsibility if it turns out they were wrong?
Parole boards, and no.
Well, they get fired if they're wrong. So they are held accountable.
Do they get fired if they are wrong?
Can you point me to a single US jurisdiction that tracks the performance of parole board members and which ones voted to release someone who commits a future crime (and, to be fair, which ones voted not to release someone who did not commit a future crime) and makes continued service dependent on having better than average performance?
life is life, even if you double it and redouble it.
But life, halved, isn't life.
I agree that ten years for the judge would probably have been more than enough to serve the ends of general deterrence, especially given the civil consequences (loss of position, loss of pension, inability to return to practicing law, widespread shunning, probable divorce) that went along with getting caught.
The ex-judge can also be considered to be rehabilitated, inasmuch as he will never again be in a position such as to make it possible to repeat the offences.
On the other hand denunciation is also a legitimate consideration. On the third hand, fourteen years jail plus the aforementioned civil consequences express denunciation quite forcefully. On balance, I think I agree with Kevin.
Exactly.
But he explicitly took years of life from kids. Far more than ten.
We don't do "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth", nor should we.
He took several thousand years of life from the youth he put in jail. It's NOWHERE near an eye for an eye.
The punishment should be proportional to the damage done.
Agreed. Now, what sentence is proportional to the damage done by a murder?
I think the death penalty is WAY underutilized.
Death should be the standard sentence for deliberate murders without significant mitigating circumstances and it should usually get carried out within a few months of sentencing - very few convictions and sentences have serious grounds for appeal.
Especially in the US, the difference between murder and justifiable homicide is in the eye of the beholder in far too many cases. My view is that the guy in New York (Penny?) is a murderer; his jury didn't agree.
Americans simply do not take homicide seriously enough to justify mandatory death penalties.
He stole way more than that from the kids he jailed,
So... no, not an eye for an eye.
This guy deserved a longer sentence. He stole many more years of life from kids.
That said, I think commuting this guy's sentence in a batch of a thousand others is fine. One rotten guy so a thousand can go free? Fine.
He really was a piece of work:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Conahan
Why was there a need to commute his sentence so a thousand others could go free? Nothing stopped Biden from making him an exception.
But why do you think the others whose sentences were commuted deserved to go free? Their crimes may have gotten less publicity but they still hurt people.
Um, Kevin, in this "particularly overlong" sentence, the perpetrator was guilty of sentencing first time offending young teens to long sentences in return for cash payments from the private prison company to whose "care" they were sentenced.
Dude, you are hoist on your own petard on this one; it isn't even consistent to oppose his long term, because he was sentencing the young people to overlong sentences!
Oy vey! The DEX must be kicking in.....
Why is it not consistent? They are two different acts.
Agreed, the post isn't inconsistent. What the subject is is ironic. The Prison Industrial Complex is why the US has such long sentences: more profits! This judge ended up a victim of the same system that was paying him to victimize others. He got an over long sentence for handing out over long sentences.
The judge was wrong to sentence those kids to overly long sentences. His judge was wrong to sentence him to an overly long sentence. There's no contradiction.
But the judge's harm stretched over MANY more lives for extended periods, too, when the victims were at an age that the potential for damage was most severe.
People placed in positions with such huge impacts on other people's lives should be held to MUCH higher standards than those they judge.
I understand this is morally/logically consistent with your stated stance on sentencing being too long and harsh in our country in general, and I agree.
However, in this case, I think the political damage is of greater import than some fucko serving the remaining 3 years of his well-earned sentence, so I gotta disagree.
Biden's retiring, and by the time the next election rolls around this will be forgotten. There is no political damage.
What a cynical, asshole, TRUMPIAN transactional thing to say.
You forgot one. It was a "cynical, asshole, TRUMPIAN transactional" TRUE thing to say.
Biden isn't the one who's going to pay the price.
This is nonsense.
If someone is going to hold Democrats at fault for (let me check notes) commuting a sentence 1/5th of its way from the end, after already more than ten years, for one wretched guy so that a thousand others overcharged can be free...
...That person is wretched and not worth engaging with.
I saw you put this idiotic false choice in another comment. I didn't engage with it because it wasn't worth engaging with.
It's not a choice between "commute this guy's sentence and 1000 others also get commuted, or don't commute this guy's sentence and all 1001 of them stay in jail."
That's a really dumb way to look at it. Those other 1000 can be commuted without commuting this guy's and without scoring a political own-goal.
And yes, this guy's sentence is a political football unless/until everybody who's over-incarcerated has their sentences adjusted or commuted.
You're right. My thesis is that there will be no price paid by anybody.
That's not what you said, but even re-stated this way I still think you're wrong.
"There is no political damage" = "there will be no price paid by anybody". Two different ways of saying exactly the same thing.
Dude committed one of the worst crimes I’ve ever heard of where the perpetrator didn’t directly hurt someone. Stole years from 1,000s of children to line his pockets. A lot of people have gone to jail for a lot longer for a lot less. I guess it pays to be a person of means with law degree.
While I generally think most sentences are to long I personally suspect he got off relatively easily. The legal system tends to treat people of means who can speak and present themselves well and have fancy lawyers a lot better than those who don’t have these things.
The bulk of the comments in this thread are a testament to the "prison as vengeance" mentality of America. The day when we all look back on this prison system with the same shame as slavery can not come soon enough.
the only humane comment here. reading the comments one understands why the u.s. still has the death penalty. a christian nation , right?
Shame would be appropriate if we knew of a more humane way to prevent re-offending, and chose incarceration instead. But we don't. Someday we may get to that point, but the implication is that the state will have much more ability to control the behavior of its citizens. I don't think you will like that Clockwork Orange world any better than our present one.
👍
I don’t like criminals. I don’t think Mr. Drum does either and I applaud his tolerance for corruption, chaos and mayhem. It’s something I can’t muster anymore. It’s hard for me to come up with the right approach to crime. Mr. Drum, bless his heart, often seems unable to grasp its horror.
Dude, you advocate violence repeatedly in these comments.
I think the horror is you.
He was a fucking judge. He should have gotten 20.
He's been in for over ten and is old and out of office.
He shoulda gotten twenty to life, but that also doesn't mean he hasn't served his time.
I’ll reserve judgment until I find out the longest sentence one of those kids had. If he was willing to sentence someone for that length, he should have no qualms about serving it himself.
This is the single most fitting idea I've seen for dealing with this guy.
The fact that he was wielding the power of the state when he sentenced the people he was judging, and was using that power to line his own pockets, makes this among the worst kinds of offenses I can think of. He wasn't an individual doing bodily harm to other individuals or their property; he was an arm of the state using the authority it-- meaning the citizens of PA-- granted him. That puts his crimes in one of the worst categories, for me.
Is he civilly liable for this? Can his victims sue for damages and reduce him to the penury he earned? I suspect what he did is shielded by sovereign immunity or a related doctrine. That, too, underlines how abusive his crimes were. I'll be bloodthirsty and say that in this kind of case, where state authority over the bodies and freedom of citizens, was misused for mere personal gain, retribution is a worthy aim of the legal process. It should have a salutary deterrent effect too.
Just to add, this guy apparently was on a long list the ACLU put together that didn't have much detail about the individual cases. If the administration had been thinking about doing something like this, somebody should have been going through the list for standout anomalies like this one. If it's more spur of the moment I can understand the oversight and would attribute it to the ACLU.
I agree. Since I moved to Canada, it's taken some time to get used to the shorter sentences here, but quite evidently the sentences serve society just as well, or better.
Kevin leaves out a critical point. Both judges had a plea agreement in place to spend only 7 years in prison. But the trial judge rejected the agreement beacuse both defendants continued to deny their crimes. So if they had to spend more than 7 years in prison, that's on them.
Beyond that, Kevin is contnually reprimaing liberals for saying stupid things (e.g., Defund the Police). But I guess it's okay for him to say stupid stuff? Maybe we need to have a conversation about prison sentence length but these aren't the defendants to hang your hat on. Read the room and the outrage.
This. It'd be one thing if this were just part of an across the board sentence reduction thing or something, but it's not. The guy's sentence was specifically commuted.
I generally agree with the country being too harsh/overly incarcerated, and that the incarceration is highly unfair with regards to socioeconomic status and race.
And it's true that no matter what, Republicans were going to screech about all of this. However, we don't care about them or their voters. What we care about is the persuadable/low-info voters. Stuff like this is the little kernel of truth (or point where there can be reasonable disagreement) and unforced error that we have to avoid.
It literally was an across the board sentence reduction thing, where over 1500 had their sentences commuted.
So, sort of: it was a blanket commutation for people who were out on home confinement for various offenses. It wasn't based on the offenses themselves, which is what I meant. My bad there.
That said, they could have just as easily vetted the list of people instead of simply granting a blanket commutation.
The challenge, shorter criminal sentences alone, are not a clear win. Per Google, the recidivism rate is very high. Unless one can materially reduce recidivism rates, I think shorter sentences are a tough political hurdle.
Federal recidivism
In 2018, the recidivism rate for people released from federal prisons was 46.2%.
State recidivism over time
A 2023 analysis found that 82% of people released from state prisons were rearrested within 10 years. A 2018 report found that the recidivism rate for state prisoners is around 68% within three years, 79% within five years, and 83% within nine years
How old were the recidivists upon release?
The answer to that one is better prisons. Prisons in the US tend to treat prisoners like vicious animals, so they come out of jail conditioned to act like vicious animals. Recidivism rates are much lower in countries where sentences are shorter and the prisoners are treated like people. Norway is by far the best example.
I think a lot of it comes down to is prison for reforming criminals or punishing them? We clearly have a system geared toward it being punishment not reform. I used to work at a halfway house for juveniles being released as adults (aging out of the system). One of the biggest challenges was getting them to think outside of a us (criminals) vs them (authority) mindset. The vast majority were not unredeemable but often believed themselves to be after years of the system treating as such. I think this is only multiplied in the adult system which often has people coming out worse than when they entered. Our society revels in prison being harsh, rape being normal, and the occupants being unredeemable. We could start by making sure prison is safe for the occupants. Reform of the criminal has little chance for success if we keep them in a state of constant vigilance and fear.
What qualifies as recidivism for a federal crime?
What is the unemployment rate for that group?
People are often bad at appreciating how much time things take, and how much time has passed. I can think of things from the 90s and I have to think about it a moment to contextualize that those things were 25 years ago.
Most people have not thought a bit about this judge since he was in the headlines, so when his name comes up and the last thing they know about him is the crime there is no sense that time has passed and it seems like he needs to be jailed right now.
And, also, private prisons are a crime and everyone who owns one needs to be convicted but we don't seem to be able to even try to address this monstrous vulgarity.
How are they a crime? Please tell me what law they violate.
But no, that's not what you mean. What you mean is that people who engage in legal businesses that you dislike should be jailed. Typical liberal.
Kevin, the reason many (I'm one of them) think that prison sentences are way too long in the US, is because way too many people get too long sentences for relatively minor crimes, or non violent crimes. Not once have I thought that sentences are too long if I hear a mass murderer or a child rapist gets multiple decades or life in prison.
A blind across the board cut like you propose has to be the most stupid political idea I've heard, even worse than the "Defund the police" slogan you so fervently criticized. I can already imagine the adds showing the pictures of someone who raped, killed, and mutilated children while mentioning that this or that Democrat wants to set him free.
I'm all for reducing the sentences of the majority of people currently in prison, but not with a blanket cut. Certain criminals do need to stay away from society forever, and there is nothing wrong with stating so.
Weirdly his suggestion doesn't contradict you.
This bit very much do so, and even goes the extra mile by suggesting it is wrong to wish certain sentences be cut but others not.
"Many liberals are open to this argument except when it's for something they especially disapprove of. But that's wrong. If you believe that we over-punish, then we should stop doing it. For everyone."
Scott Alexander recently had a blog entry about crime and prison which demonstrated that the median US prisoner has had TEN previous arrests.
Given that, how much lighter should sentences really be?
Maybe the system should make more effort to identify and release one-time offenders, but on the whole what we're doing seems appropriate.
The value of prison is incapacitation, not deterrence.
Arrests for what? For murder? For armed robbery? For jaywalking? For truancy? For having dark skin?
Maybe that 10 median arrests mean that we're locking up superpredators. Or maybe it means that continually arresting kids teaches them that since they're gonna be arrested no matter what they do, they might as well commit some crimes?
You should read it for yourself, search 'astral codex ten crime'
Arrests mean nothing. It's convictions that count.
One or two arrests means nothing.
Convictions obscures the problem since the whole system depends on plea deals which drop multiple charges
What is shocking about the corrupt judge who sentenced children to long, abusive sentence terms is that there are many more judges taking bribes to sentence children to long, abusive sentence terms. More shocking is too many Americans think children deserve long, abusive incarceration.
I get all my news from Randy Rainbow,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmrNhbn8KI8
Bad staff work. Accepting a list without vetting each name was incompetence. Most sentences are too long, some are too short. The instant case was the latter.
Two points:
1) IIRC once upon a time, back in a faraway day, judges got (a lot) more discretion when sentencing the guilty party. Nowadays, with the advent of mandatory sentencing guidelines, not so much.
2) Why are penalties limited to incarceration? I suspect there are a fair number of people who are less deterred by jail time than they are prospects of impoverishment. This particular judge, the one who grossly betrayed a public trust? Garnish his wages to the point of impoverishing him for the rest of his life. The same applies to any income derived from personal wealth, selling off assets, say, or distributions from any stock he owns. No, you don't get to sell off a ten million dollar property to lead a comfortable life, albeit not at the level you've become used to.
People are generally bad at making time value calculations; I believe psychologists call it a 'hyperbolic discount horizon' or Somesuch. But poverty? That's near and immediate. People play plenty of attention to that kind of penalty, don't ask me why.
"This particular judge" isn't a judge any more, and I strongly doubt that he will be permitted to go back to practicing law. I expect he's lost his pension plan. If he was married he's probably not any more, and his ex will have been awarded most of his property. In short, the poverty you seek is probably already upon him.
+1
Although this guy didn't just take money away from kids, he put them away for years, so there's that. And we couldn't trust him to be a judge anymore.
Perhaps it's worth mentioning that criminal sentences increased during the War on Drugs, and the sentences fell most heavily on non-whites. Over the period after WWII, however, deinstitutionalization led to a HUGE decrease in life sentences for non-criminals who suffered from 1)mental illness and 2)intellectual disabilities and/or develomental and physical disabilities.
So now we see mentally ill people camped out in cities or riding the subways at risk of murders by the non-mentally ill, while intellectually disabled folks are living in community residences and going to sheltered workshops or community-based employment bagging your groceries, etc.
It's also worth mentioning that the large, state institutions (euphemistically referred to as "schools") that warehoused the disabled were jobs programs for people with no college education. Those jobs programs have been replaced with prisons for criminals.
I agree with Kevin Drum. I want there to be more compassion and less vengefulness.
We should never forget that penalties do not undo the crimes committed. We can not restore to the victims what was taken from them (at least not completely).
Deterrence in order to reduce the number of crimes is the main purpose of punishment by the law. And we know that severe sentences are not more deterrent than milder sentences. We also know that a high probability to get away with it is the opposite of deterrent. Consequently we should invest in police capacity, especially detectives, not in running lots of prisons.
I love you, Kevin. This is so counterintuitive but the logic checks out. From 17 years to 14 years? Pfft.
Except for one thing. When you say sentences are too long for ALL crimes, you include white collar crimes which are notoriously way too light.
For embezzlement, money laundering and insider trading, the average sentence is 23 months. The statutory sentence is WAY longer. But because this has been the case for so long, a reasonable sentence today would be grounds for an appeal based on disparate treatment compared to similarly situated individuals.
Knock over a 7/11 for $50 and you get 20 years. Embezzle $20 million and you get 6 months. I mean, fo god's sake, Allen Weisselberg only got 5 months for lying under oath. Statutory sentence is up to 7 years.