Mandatory Minimum Sentences
Jim Cusack, Sunday Independent security correspondent, claimed this week that mandatory minimum sentences “will win the crime war”. His experience has taught him that “five years is the length of sentence that breaks all but the truly hardened criminals”, writes Chekov Feeney.
The current problem with our sentencing regime is that “most robbers and drug dealers who escape with such light sentences (18 to 30 months) immediately re-offend”. By contrast, “most criminals sentenced to five years or more re-offend far less often”.
Cusack offers the following evidence in support of this theory: “as one senior source put it ‘five years softens their cough'”. He backs this up by recounting how “twenty years ago the west of Dublin was beset by young joyriders” until “the government changed the law, making it an offence punishable by four years and, within a short time and after the first few hefty sentences, even the dimmest joyriders copped on”.
Cusack must be the only person in the country who believes that joyriding was eradicated 20 years ago. Nobody told the department of justice anyway. The Garda reported a five per cent rise in such crimes in 2004. Longer term trends are hard to identify. The best that the Minister for Justice could do in a Dáil debate on the “scourge of joyriding” in 2000, for example, was to state that “the scale of the problem seems to vacillate and there is a problem with the scale at present which must be addressed”.
The claimed crime-healing benefits of a five year course of Cusack's cough medicine appear similarly dubious. According to Rick Lines, director of the Irish Penal Reform Trust, “Mandatory sentencing has been implemented in various parts of the United States since the 1980s, so there is no shortage of research on its effects...this tells us that mandatory minimum sentencing has no effect in reducing crime”. At least 18 states in the US have rolled back mandatory sentencing legislation due to a lack of evidence of its effectiveness and the huge costs it carries.
A review of the academic literature carried out by Thomas Gabor, Professor of Criminology at the University of Ottawa, came to a similar conclusion. He found that mandatory minimum sentences could increase prison populations by 500 per cent while having minimal effect on crime rates.
But why trouble yourself with evidence when a senior source can supply you with a handy bar-stool one-liner?
Another journalist who forgot to trouble herself with evidence last weekend was Dearbhail McDonald of the Sunday Times. She reported the story of a Dundalk based website called El Paso which had been forced to shut down after “Ted Randall, the director of US operations of CMR Radio Network Nashville” who issued the site with “very serious legal documents” on behalf of local singer Kathy Maguire, whom El Paso had apparently defamed.
The trouble is that the story was a hoax. While anybody can fall for a good spoof, McDonald might have benefited from a closer examination of the evidence.
She could have tried to contact the sources to verify the details. El Paso reported (three days after it was supposed to have been shut down) that McDonald didn't try to get in touch with the site by email. The quotes in her article attributed to Ted Randall and the El Paso site were lifted directly from the spoof. McDonald contacted “a senior officer” from Dundalk who assured her that they had been keeping an eye on the site.
If she had taken the trouble to do a quick Google search to confirm the existence of “Ted Randall” or for the “CMR Radio” she would have discovered that the only relevant information on the internet was a long list of conspiracy theory sites which referred to the paranormal experiences of one Ted Randall, general manager of country music station, WJKM-AM. That might have sparked her suspicion.