THREAD: Today you will hear a lot of glowing discussion about Justice Breyer. This is a different story--one about how a fraud by Breyer led to one of the greatest increases in human caging in modern world history. What he did to so many families is important to know.
In the 1980s Justice Breyer was a main architect of the federal Sentencing Guidelines, one of the great scandals of mass human caging. But even in legal circles, many people don't understand what Breyer and his co-conspirators did.
There were two main (and many more) frauds perpetrated by 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.
First, the Guidelines purported to be scientific. Elites said they 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 increased them all! fd.org/sites/default/…
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.
In the 18 years the Sentencing Guidelines were mandatory in federal courts, sentences got longer and longer, and the federal prison population exploded almost 400% from 49,378 to 187,394.
Many families were separated, and a lot of people died. One of the most vital facts to know about our society is that every additional year in prison takes 2 years off a person's life. prisonpolicy.org/blog/2017/06/2…
And it all adds up. Overall average U.S. life expectancy is 1.8 years lower than if US caged people like comparable countries. This means that this kind of fraudulent pushing of mass incarceration actually takes hundreds of millions of life years away from all of us combined.
Breyer's Sentencing Guidelines have controlled federal sentencing for decades even though they are only "advisory" now. Everyone was told it was based on evidence--that it was a "reform" needed to *reduce* things like racial disparities across judges. That was a lie.
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.
I write more about how punishment bureaucrats use "reform" to expand state violence for profit in this article, with hundreds of examples. yalelawjournal.org/forum/the-puni…
The shorthand twitter graphic says overall life expectancy shortened by 5 years. That's incorrect. As noted in the article, the study finds that the difference in overall life expectancy is 1.8 years less than it would be without this additional incarceration.
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