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December 17, 2018
Some of Senator Cotton's suspect claims in his latest case for amendments to the FIRST STEP Act
As noted in an update to this prior post, Senator Tom Cotton has this new National Review commentary making the case for his proposed amendments to the latest version of the FIRST STEP Act under the headline "Fix the First Step Act and Keep Violent Criminals behind Bars." This commentary closes with a passage that troubled me, especially when I looked up the facts of the case he discusses. Here is how Senator Cotton concludes (with a few details emphasized by me for further commentary):
So far the debate over First Step has been clouded by euphemism and abstraction, which has prevented the public from understanding what the bill actually does. A concrete example will help clarify the stakes. Richard Crawford is a former NASCAR driver who was convicted in August of trying to force a twelve-year-old girl to have sex with him. Crawford was sentenced to nearly 11 years in federal prison, but the statute he was convicted under does not appear in First Step’s “ineligible prisoners” list. If the bill passes, he will therefore be eligible for time credits that would reduce his time in prison by up to one-third, or nearly four years. At the end of his prison sentence he would be moved into pre-release custody or supervised release. He would essentially be a free man.
Crawford’s sex crime was not obscure, low-level, or “victimless.” Quite the opposite. His crime had the potential to shatter a child’s life. It was punished accordingly by a judge and a jury of his peers. That is how criminal justice ought to work in America. Now a group of politicians and activists are in a position to overturn that public judgment with the First Step Act. Conservatives should resist this revolution.
The last few sentences of this passage initially troubled me because nothing in the FIRST STEP Act serves to "overturn" a jury conviction or even a sentencing term. Rather, the FSA creates additional incentives, through "time credits," for offenders to engage in recidivism-reducing programs. I think the FSA is popular because the "public judgment" is that it would generally be better for Crawford to be released in 2025 after having successfully engaged in this programming than to be released in 2028 without having made any effort to better himself.
But even more irksome to me is how Senator Cotton portrays his poster child, Richard Crawford, because it seems a bit much to say he tried "to force a twelve-year-old girl to have sex with him" given that he was convicted based on law enforcement posing as a man soliciting people to have sex with a fictitious 12-year-old. This article about the case explains:
Crawford was accused of agreeing to pay $50-$75 to have sex with a 12-year-old girl, making arrangements with a man named Mike on Craigslist. Mike and the 12-year-old girl were fictitious and used by law enforcement to catch Crawford in the act. He responded to an undercover federal agent via e-mail and text between Feb. 10 and Feb. 28. According to the agent, Crawford texted him, “Love for her to be naked and ready,” and asked for photos of the girl. Crawford was arrested at a location at which he agreed to meet “Mike” on March 1 by the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office and was indicted March 30.
Crawford claimed he agreed to the scenario because he didn’t believe it really involved a child. His defense was detailed in a recent court filing, arguing against a lengthy sentence. "Mr. Crawford testified that he thought 'Mike,' the person he was corresponding with, was engaging in a fantasy and that he agreed to participate," the filing read. "Mr. Crawford did not believe there would be a minor present; instead, he thought there would be an adult woman, presumably 'Mike's' wife or girlfriend, and that he and this woman would act the roles in 'Mike's' fantasy."
"Mr. Crawford consistently maintained that he had no intent to have sex with a minor, and if a minor had been present, he would not have had sex with the minor.”
A jury rejected Crawford's claims of innocence and convicted him of "attempted enticement of a minor to engage in sexual activity." But to say he tried to force a 12-year-old to have sex seems off since there never was an actual 12-year-old. Indeed, I think it fair to call Crawford's crime "victimless," though the case really serves as a great indication of how hard it is to place accurate short-hand labels on various crimes (and how easy it is for Senator Cotton to make a crime sound worse than it was is using short-hand labels). To allow Crawford, who is 60 years old and appears to have no criminal history, the chance to earn "time credits" by completing evidence-based programming to reduce his risk of recidivism seem to me sensible, not scary. (And, as I understand matters, if a risk assessment procedure were to classify Crawford as "high-risk" he would not in fact get any sentence reductions.)
We will see in the coming days whether Senator Cotton gets his proposed amendments added to the FIRST STEP Act. But if Richard Crawford is the worst version of Willie Horton that he can conjure up for the coming debate, I am not at all convinced there is any need to carve out still further exceptions to the prison reform provisions that seem well-conceived to try to reduce the recidivism risk of as many federal prisoners as possible.
Some of the most recent of many prior related posts:
- Senator Tom Cotton, rather than argue against FIRST STEP Act, makes case for what should be in a SECOND STEP Act
- Four changes to the FIRST STEP Act sought by Senator Tom Cotton
- Senator Tom Cotton continuing to do everything he can to try to keep the FIRST STEP Act from moving forward
- A notable debunking of "Three Myths From Critics of Criminal Justice Reform"
- FIRST STEP Act, already compromised to cater to tough-on-crime crowd, may be watered down further for Senate vote
- Latest chapter of FIRST STEP Act massaging and messaging
- The faulty and foul thinking continuing to thwart a vote on the FIRST STEP Act
- Senator Ted Cruz supports FIRST STEP Act with revisions, Prez Trump tweets for a "VOTE," and the bill's prospects brighten
- Senate leader Mitch McConnell says in floor speech that he will bring up FIRST STEP Act for a vote!!
- Latest developments and discussions surrounding FIRST (baby) STEP Act
- Details on further carve-outs and amendments to FIRST STEP Act sought by Senators Tom Cotton and John Kennedy
- Making the case against amendments to the FIRST STEP Act proposed by Senators Cotton and Kennedy ... UPDATED with a response on 12/17
December 17, 2018 at 12:36 PM | Permalink
Comments
Oh goodie, an anecdote! I love anecdotes! Willie Horton Willie Horton.
Posted by: Fat Bastard | Dec 17, 2018 4:04:29 PM
All this illustrates is once again how malleable the term "crime of violence" has become. Now, enticement is the same thing as force. But that is not how we normally think of things. To entice something is to draw it towards one. So under the Senator's train of logic every time a woman puts on lipstick or wiggles her hips she is engaged in a crime of violence.
Frankly, Cotton is just a god damn liar and people who elect god damn liars are disgusting.
Posted by: Daniel | Dec 17, 2018 8:15:32 PM
Sen. Cotton is just a tool of the prison industrial complex. I really hope these amendments do not get attached to the final bill. It seems to me that it would pass without these amendments, and that his colleagues realize how absurd his ideas are. It's unfortunate that sex offenses are almost always excluded from any good time credits or incentives to rehabilitate. It makes no sense from any standpoint.
Mr. Berman, I'm a paralegal student and formally incarcerated person. (Just so you know who's reading your blog.)
Posted by: Chris | Dec 17, 2018 11:22:41 PM
There are so many different circumstances to every case. One example is three generations working on a fourth of false accusers. Women that use their children as tools against men. The people never know about the CPS records, the police reports or weather they are alcoholics or use drugs. The courts just automatically award the children to the mother and collect fees from the father. The courts have done more damage to the human race then any enemy.
What America Has Done To Its Young People Is Appalling
by Tyler Durden
Tue, 12/04/2018 - 21:45
Authored by James Ostrowski via LewRockwell.com,
Critics are perhaps too quick to judge America’s young people, citing declining SAT scores, obesity, drug overdoses, addiction to smart phones, bizarre alterations of personal appearance and high rates of (alleged) mental illness. It’s just too easy to be annoyed at how some of the cashiers at the local grocery store seem unable to carry on a conversation or have chosen to mutilate their faces with pieces of metal. We are perhaps too quick to condemn the crazed behavior of young protesters in recent years without fully considering what our government, society and culture have done to these poor souls.
Let’s begin at the beginning. Forty percent of Americans are now born out of wedlock. Single parent families are associated with a long list of social maladies:
“Children who grow up with only one of their biological parents (nearly always the mother) are disadvantaged across a broad array of outcomes. . . . they are twice as likely to drop out of high school, 2.5 times as likely to become teen mothers, and 1.4 times as likely to be idle — out of school and out of work — as children who grow up with both parents. Children in one-parent families also have lower grade point averages, lower college aspirations, and poorer attendance records. As adults, they have higher rates of divorce. These patterns persist even after adjusting for differences in race, parents’ education, number of siblings, and residential location.” Sara McLanahan, “The Consequences of Single Motherhood,” American Prospect(Summer 1994).
In addition, a large number of marriages will fail. That means that close to sixty percent of children will not grow up in the classic nuclear family of the 1950’s. How much of this change is due to government policies is hard to say, however, as government grows, the traditional family shrinks. When government subsidies to single parent families increase, so do the number of such families. As Jack Kemp used to say, when you subsidize something, you get more of it. Yes, culture also plays a role but don’t forget that government can change the culture as well. Women tend to come out ahead in Family Court—they get the house, the kids and much of the man’s spare change thanks to unrealistic support formulas. This provides an incentive in marginal cases for women to seek a divorce. Increases in divorces made them more socially acceptable over time.
Even with intact families, the idyllic norm of the 1950’s, where the mother typically stayed home to take care of the kids until they reached school age and perhaps even long afterwards, has been destroyed. These days, in the typical American family, both parents work fulltime which means that a very large percentage of children are consigned to daycare. Daycare was virtually unknown in my world growing up in the 1960’s. On the working class South Buffalo street where I grew up, I don’t recall any mother with young children working full-time. The overwhelming majority were housewives while a few would get part-time jobs after the kids started school. I was not aware of any daycare centers in the neighborhood and certainly do not recall anyonewho ever attended one.
The statistics bear this out. Daycare was once unusual for the middle class, but now over two-thirds of children lack a full-time stay-at-home parent. (Source: Center for American Progress) Like single parent families, daycare carries with it a long list of undesirable likely consequences. These include “more mental and behavioral problems, more mind-altering drugs, more STDs, more obese, unhappy and institutionalized children of all ages.” Mary Eberstadt, “Home-Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs, and Other Parent Substitutes” (2004) (A fabulous but widely-ignored book).
Thus, in the critical first five years of life, the vast majority of Americans are deprived of the obvious benefits of growing up in an intact family with the mother at home in the pre-school years. We baby boomers took this for granted. That world is gone with the wind. Why? Two main reasons: feminism and progressive big government.
Feminism encouraged women to get out of the home and out from under the alleged control of husbands who allegedly controlled the family finances. Traditional mothers were derided as “baby factories” as if working in an actual factory making widgets was somehow more edifying than nurturing human beings at home.
Second, the trend toward ever larger and more intrusive big government that started in the Progressive Era around 1916, hadn’t yet weighed down the economy to the extent that two incomes were needed to support a family in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Yet, government grows steadily under progressive ideology, and after the twin shocks of the Great Society and the Vietnam War, by the 1970’s stagflation kicked in and it became increasingly difficult to support a family with one income. Married women, whether they liked it or not or were under the sway of feminist ideology, were pushed into the labor market if only to have most of their wages seized to pay the dozens of taxes the family must pay. The take-home pay of many women is barely more than the family’s total tax bill. Ironically, “women’s lib” ended up converting women from baby factories into full-time tax livestock.
It gets worse. After five years of being raised by strangers and deprived of maternal care, 90% of American youth are compelled to attend government schools for 12-13 years. As I explained in my book, Government Schools are Bad for Your Kids,government schools are rife with crime, drugs, promiscuity, mediocre education and political propaganda.
Next comes college for about 70% of Americans. While many young people thrive in college, many others graduate with huge debt and poor job prospects and a hard left ideology poorly suited for success in life. Leftism teaches resentment of others, inculcates a victim mentality and teaches some students to hate their skin color while teaching others to blame the skin color of others for the difficulties they will face in life. Leftism does not inculcate the positive thinking, initiative, work ethic and perseverance in the face of adversity which are the hallmarks of successful people.
Finally, we send this disadvantaged group of young Americans into a very hostile job market. Here, we saddle them with their per capita share of government debt as the guarantors of the fraudulent campaign promises of dead progressive politicians such as FDR and LBJ. A good accountant could figure how this debt translates into increased per capita taxes by dividing the number of taxpayers by the annual debt service. It is perhaps $2000 per person. Next comes student loan debt, a contrivance once again of dead progressive politicians to benefit overpaid progressive and left professors and administrators. This can easily be yet another $2000 per year.
Young people are shunted into the job market because the progressive state has made starting a business extremely difficult with a bundle of taxes and regulations. The mere process of getting a job, which used to take a few days in the free market, now takes many months. Many jobs require government permission. Employers need to vet employees more carefully to avoid a plethora of costly discrimination lawsuits. Young workers’ productivity is largely eaten up by the direct and indirect effects of a myriad and taxes and regulations, often leaving workers with just enough to pay the bills but not move forward, have families or save for the future. As a result, a record number of young people are forced to move back in with their parents.
The startling message I want to convey is that modern America treats its young people abominably from birth through young adulthood. This is largely because of the direct and indirect effects of numerous destructive progressive policies. This explains the numerous problems many young people are having. They have a right to be angry but need to focus on the true cause of the overwhelming majority of these problems: progressive big government. To the young people of America, I say: take the red pill; then, don’t get mad; get even. Make life better for your own children than what progressive America foisted upon you.
Posted by: LC in Texas | Dec 18, 2018 7:31:12 PM
