Thread: It's not widely known outside legal circles, but in the 1980s Justice Breyer was a main architect of the Sentencing Guidelines, one of the great scandals of mass human caging. But even in legal circles, most people don't understand what a fraud Breyer perpetrated. (1)
There were two main (and many more) frauds perpetrated by elite bureaucrats who designed the Sentencing Guidelines. Hundreds of thousands of poor people and people of color were consigned to millions of extra years in cages as a result of choices Breyer and his group made. (2)
First, the Guidelines purported to be scientific. Elites said they were needed to combat variation among judges. So Breyer and friends did a "past practice study." But after standardizing sentences based on past results as promised, Breyer simply increased them all! (3)
Second, when calculating the "average" past sentence (again, standardizing was supposed to be the point), Breyer and friends **excluded all the sentences to zero jail time.** That means they artificially cooked the books so that the "average" sentence would look much higher. (4)
These Sentencing Guidelines have controlled federal sentencing for decades, and everyone was told it was based on evidence--that it was needed to **reduce** things like racial disparities across judges. That was a lie. (5)
Like many elite "reforms," it was actually an excuse to expand the punishment bureaucracy, which in the years that followed came to cage Black people at 6 times the rate of South Africa at height of Apartheid and greater than any country in modern recorded world history. (end)
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