21st Century Prison Sentences In America

There are many things wrong with our current justice system. I complain about them all the time. Our entire bail system, sentencing system, and prison system are way out of alignment with common sense. We read about these things piecemeal, so it's hard to track the big picture. Today it occurs to me that I may not have complained enough about the sentences being handed out by our current justice system.

Modern Sentencing Practices

This is part of the problem of prosecutorial overreach in general. Prosecutors have gone insane, charging defendants with long lists of crimes that include things that could never be proven in court. Then they add it up and make a plea offer: I've got you on all of this stuff, and it adds up to 225 years in prison, but I'll let you go with ten years if you plead guilty to the first five things on the list. Our prisons are filling up with innocent guys who looked over at their Public Defender, who looked very tired and was taking no notes, and said sure, I'll take the deal. (Fingers crossed, be out in five or six!)

Lately we've really crossed over into the zone of pure science-fiction in the years that they're giving out. Sentences that amount to life without the possibility of parole even for younger defendants.

The Fajitas Caper

Take poor old Gilberto Escamilla, age 53, down Texas way. He had some kind of administrative job in a Texas juvenile detention facility, and he came up with a great idea. At least it sounded like a great idea at the time. He figured he could order more meat than he needed to feed the kids and sell off the excess for some cash to supplement his income. The system was working great for nine years or so and then they caught him.

He doesn't sound like a hard guy; he's certainly not a career criminal type. When they arrested him, he didn't give anyone a hard time. He confessed, he told them all about it, and he pleaded guilty to save them the necessity of giving him a trial. All of that usually buys a defendant a bit of good will at sentencing time, at least it did before the world went stark-raving insane.

Somebody, probably the prosecutor, came up with a figure for how much all of that meat was worth. $1.3 million dollars, they figured. (One million, three hundred thousand dollars.) That would be $144,000 every year, or about $12,000 every month. We lawyers are not famous for our math skills, and I'm pretty sure that this prosecutor misplaced a decimal point or something.

The Dallas News names the prosecutor as Peter Gilman, Esq., an ADA for Cameron County, TX. He zoomed straight to hyperbole for his sentencing suggestion, too. He asked for, and got, a sentence of fifty years! (50!) Mr. Gilman told the judge, “we must send a message that theft by public servants warrants a long prison term.”

To help us consider just how wacky this is, and since we are off into the realm of sci-fi already, let's crank up the Way-Back machine and return to the pre-1960s world. How would this case have been handled back in, let's say, 1960? Eisenhower is still president, and everybody's panic response is still focused on the Soviet Union.

First, I'm going to cut that estimate of the value of the meat in half. Even at half, I doubt that old Gilberto was putting $6,000 in his pocket every month for nine years, much less the $12,000 from the ADA's estimate. So half, say $600,000. Let's adjust that for inflation. Right now you'd be lucky to buy two houses in Hawthorne, California for $300,000 apiece. In 1960, those same two houses would cost you about $15,000 apiece, for a total amount stolen that comes to $30,000. So, old-days Gilberto is arrested for stealing $30,000 worth of meat over a nine year period. He confesses quickly, and pleads guilty. Can't just let him off with probation, so we've got to give him some prison time. I'm thinking that it's a three-to-five. Remember, there was no force or fear involved, it wasn't robbery, there was no gun involved. There are no aggravating factors, and we had the fast guilty plea and remorse in mitigation.

What's the difference between a 3 to 5, and a 50 straight up, no chaser? The prosecutors then weren't in a fever to pile on years and fill up the prisons like our current crop of tough guys.

Does 3 to 5 sound light to you? It could have been less. Stealing a car is grand theft, and guys would only get a year or two for that back then. Recall that in the 1957 movie, Jailhouse Rock, Elvis' character was sentenced to one year for involuntary manslaughter. Which is the way that it might have turned out, actually. It was a mutual-combat situation gone wrong, with one man landing on the floor just right (wrong) and busting his head. So there was an intentional act to harm from Elvis, the punch, and as a result, someone died. An unintended result, but there you have it. Involuntary manslaughter. One year!

And God Help You If You're Black

Last year a read about a woman who really got a bad break. Her and her boyfriend got it in their drug-addled heads that if they could get a little crack business going, they could get a free stash and maybe make a couple of bucks besides. These people were the walking definition of small time. They were arrested as soon as prosecutors had an “act in furtherance” to support a charge of conspiracy to sell crack cocaine. So they never even made a dollar between them, and after some kind of judicial process they were sentenced to hundreds of years. The woman is still in prison, serving a sentence that I seem to remember as 175 years.

Don't hold me to facts on that one, but here's one from the Washington Post, back in 2015.

Sharanda Jones was almost thirty-years-old in 1999 when she was sentenced to life in federal prison for her first offense, a non-violent offense involving powder cocaine. There is no parole in the federal system, so life is life.

She brought together a buyer and a seller for a powder cocaine deal. That's pretty small time right there. Powder was bringing much shorter sentences than crack, so it doesn't look like such a big deal. Then those clever prosecutors got a hold of it! It's enhancements time!

Enhancement! She was part of a drug conspiracy!

Enhancement! It's a conspiracy to distribute and sell crack, because she either knew or should have known that the cocaine was intended to be turned into crack!

Enhancement! She had a license to carry a concealed gun, so that's using a gun to further a criminal conspiracy!

Enhancement! Prosecutors claimed that she had lied in her defense at the trial! That's obstruction of justice! (She had only been convicted on one count out of seven.)

Enhancement! Prosecutors described her as the leader of the conspiracy! (See how they do this? They just say it and it magically becomes so.)

By the time they were done, the mandatory sentencing guidelines forced the judge to give her life.

Defendant Is A Child? Not Anymore He's Not!

I'm not a big believer in miracles myself, but somehow every year a certain number of children are miraculously transformed into adults in American courtrooms. It's those mischievous prosecutors again. So fourteen-year-old Johnny Nobody killed one of his little friends, and it goes to juvi, and he's free again within ten years or so. What fun is that? No fun at all. So first mischievous legislators pass laws to the effect that juveniles may be tried as adults, in adult court, under certain nebulous circumstances that add up to “if the DA and the judge feel like it.”

Then some DA, and then some judge, feel like it, and suddenly, mysteriously, little Johnny is not just some shit-for-brains little snot-nose kid, he's fucking Al Capone. He get a trial, and guess what? He's guilty by a jury of his peers (none of whom are freshmen in high school, like he is), and the sentencing guideline says, “life without parole.” Please escort the prisoner to the awaiting van! And the only mercy that may be shown to the now very contrite and worried Johnny is that someone in the administration of the prison will agree to keep him in the infirmary for a few years while prison life has a chance to toughen him up before he is let loose in the general population.

Not Fun; Not Funny

As Billy Crystal famously said to Stuttering John.

Don't even get me started about prison labor, and for-profit prisons, and mass-incarceration in general. Our government is a monopolistic marriage of venal government officials and the investment class (corporations are only the sheep disguise for the super-rich wolves). What's good for them is good for America, and the curb without a blanket is good enough for the rest of us.

My conscience is clear, having voted Yellow Dog Democrat since 1972 (George McGovern, a true war hero and a fine man, look it up). Anyone who was voting otherwise was thinking about Law and Order, or Soft-on-Communism, or Welfare Queens, or Willie Horton, etc., and well, who am I to criticize, but you were backing the clampdown my friend. Now it's your socialism-dependent ass (Medicare and Social Security much?), and your struggling Gen-X kids, and your bereft hipster-gig-economy borderline gray-economy debt-slave grandkids, who are in the vice.

I hope that you're happy. We made this bed, now some of us have to lie in it. If we have managed to come this far with neither us, nor any of our family members suffering medieval prison sentences, then we're way ahead of the game.