Crimes Should Be Punished, No Matter The Color Of Your Collar

It is rather easy to set sentences for crimes such as felonies and misdemeanors. If it is first degree, the guilty party gets so many years in jail, if it is second, a different amount of years in jail. There are usually easy guidelines to follow in such cases, so such criminals usually receive similar sentences for similar cases, and, in most opinions, get what they deserve. However, this is not the case with white collar crimes and child exploitation crimes such as child pornography.

In 2005 the Supreme Court said that courts must consult federal guidelines when sentencing criminals to prison and fining them, but do not need to follow them. This allowed federal courts to have more leeway when sentencing such crimes, basing the punishments off of their sense of justice rather than a formulaic guideline to such sentences. This may have unintended and negative consequences.

According to one staffer at the New York Times, these new court rules, while not causing widespread chaos as predicted, did lead to almost arbitrary sentences that changed from judge to judge. So, two men who committed completely different levels of the same crime could end up with the same time in jail and fine. This staffer then argues, gaining credibility by quoting the Justice Department, that this will lead to “disrespect for the federal courts” because of the arbitrariness of the rulings. He then comments that as a rule sentences should be consistent and that the problem in the courts is differentiating the worst offenders from those who are less dangerous or have committed a less grievous crime. Judges give two men the same sentence for different levels of a crime because it is hard to differentiate between worse cases and more dangerous men. The editorial then goes a step further stating that ranking crimes by the size of the fraud may not be the best way to go, more dangerous criminals could be the ones with less sizable stolen goods; we must differentiate these men from the rest in order to tackle this problem.

So what can we do? What does this author wish for the people to do? For one, he aimed this article at the general public for a reason, the people have power. The people control the government, not the other way around, so if we say something the government will respond. However, he might have also been trying to target politically active Americans such as lobbyists, Congressmen, and judges to try to effect change from the inside. Whoever he was targeting, his ideas is sound and makes sense creating credibility from logic. No matter who he was targeting, they are bound to listen.