Trump nominates racist hardliner to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, jeopardizing sentencing reform
President Trump has nominated an extremist to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, one Professor William G. Otis of Georgetown Law,
whose other credits include a stint at DEA under George H. W. Bush and a federal prosecutor gig in Virginia.
If confirmed, Otis would have a lot—a lot—of potential to thwart sentencing reform and even sabotage the Sentencing Commission, which is integral to reform.
The glaring issue with Otis’s nomination: He opposes the Commission’s existence and mission.
Before a House subcommittee in 2011,
[Otis] called for abolishing the Sentencing Commission altogether,
declaring that its guidelines “favor the criminal” and
labeling it “an overfed lemur” that costs too much and no longer has the respect of the judiciary.
Expect him, if confirmed, to block every sentencing reform he can.
Sentencing reform, he said, is
“part of our country’s recent pattern of decline and retreat, of settling for lower standards in the name of a toxic brand of equality.”
Beyond his facially faulty positions on the commission and reform, Otis seems immune to reasoned analysis and devoid of concern for the social effects of higher rates of incarceration.
In blog posts, he has written that he believes the harsh crime policies and War on Drugs prosecutions of the 1980s and 1990s contributed to the precipitous crime rate drop in subsequent decades.
“Our whole sentencing system that started in the Reagan-Bush era, the system of guidelines and mandatory minimums has been a big success,” he said.
“If one judges the success of the criminal justice system by the crime rate rather than the incarceration rate, under the system we’ve had and that Jeff Sessions is now restoring, there has been a tremendous fall-off in crime.”
Most researchers who have studied the drop in crime that began in 1991 agree that locking up more people played some role — but at a high cost in dollars, damaged communities and racial inequity. People of color are disproportionately represented in the nation’s jails and prisons.
Otis has adopted a particularly hideous (read: racist) explanation for why African American and Latinx people are overrepresented in prison. And it doesn’t have to do with faulty sentencing laws.
[O]n his Crime and Consequences blog, Otis wrote:
"When Fifth Circuit Judge Edith Jones said at a University of Pennsylvania Law School talk that blacks and Hispanics are more violent than whites,
a consortium of civil rights organizations filed a complaint.
The complaint calls for stern discipline, on the grounds that the remarks were 'discriminatory and biased.' "
He added: "So far as I have been able to discover, it makes no mention of the fact that they're true."
BONUS:
Otis also has thoughts on “Orientals” and incarceration.
Thoughts that he seems to think prove he’s not racist:
It’s just about values, folks.
“Orientals have less incidence of crime than whites. …
The reason Orientals stay out of jail more than either whites or blacks is that family, life, work, education and tradition are honored more in Oriental culture than in others.
Values, not race or skin color, influence choices.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/1750923
Repugs nominated the BEST POSSIBLE asshole to crush blacks, browns and
keep the for-profit prison system filling up and sucking down $Bs from taxpayers