Is DOJ eager for (and obliquely urging) reducing the severity of the federal sentencing guideline for child porn downloading?

Among the many interesting aspect of the letter sent last month by the Justice Department's Criminal Division to the US Sentencing Commission (basics here) is its discussion of possible reform of the sentencing guidelines for child porn offenses.  Consider, in particular, these passages:

We also believe the Commission should conduct a review of — and consider amendments to — those guidelines that have lost the backing of a large part of the judiciary. These reviews should begin with the guidelines for child pornography possession offenses and fraud offenses....

The goal of any such reform would be to update the guidelines to address changing technology and realities surrounding these offenses, improve the consistency of sentences across child exploitation crimes, and ensure that the sentences for ceiiain child exploitation offenses adequately reflect the seriousness of the crimes.

We think the report to Congress ought to recommend legislation that permits the Sentencing Commission to revise the sentencing guidelines for child pornography offenses and that suggests what any revised guidelines might look like....

We believe changes in the use of technology and in the way these crimes are regularly carried out today suggest that the time is ripe for evaluating the current guidelines and considering whether reforms are warranted.  Consideration ought to be given to updating many aspects of the child pornography sentencing guidelines to better calibrate the severity and culpability of defendants' criminal conduct with the applicable guideline sentencing ranges.  Because the current guidelines are largely mandated by statute, though, legislation will be required to modify them.

The references here to "changes in the use of technology" and to the need for "the child pornography sentencing guidelines to better calibrate the severity and culpability of defendants' criminal conduct" suggest to me that the Justice Department largely agrees with the view of many federal judges that the guidelines are too severe when recommending very long prison sentences for defendants who merely download lots of child porn pictures via file-sharing programs.  I suspect the Justice Department sensibly and wisely believes that reformed federal guidelines recommending shorter (but still significant) prison terms for child porn downloading would lead to more consistency in the sentencing of these offenses.

Of course, DOJ does not here openly urge reductions in guideline ranges (probably wisely, because doing so could prompt a sound-bite political backlash).  But the last sentence of the passage above is likely a give-away of DOJ's fundamental perspective: the US Sentencing Commission would not really need new legislation from Congress in order to  make the child porn guidelines harsher.  And though it is not obvious the USSC needs new legislation from Congress in order to reduce the severity of the child porn guidelines, that the DOJ suggests legislative reforms indicates that it may be eager to get behind a thoughtful and measured reduction in the severity of the current guidelines for child pornography possession offenses.

Recent related posts:

• Fascinating assessment of federal sentencing in DOJ annual letter to US Sentencing Commission
• Wasn't pre-Booker federal sentencing an "ongoing source of discord, disunity, and criticism"?