At the risk of alienating people, we are going to have to rethink our sentencing for possession and receipt of child pornography. I am not going to waste time by stating the obvious about how I have kids and if anyone ever... We all feel that way. This wasn& #39;t a production case. https://twitter.com/keribla/status/1250228549342105600">https://twitter.com/keribla/s...

It was possession. The man was in his 60s and married. He consented to the search that resulted in police finding the pornography and he told them they would find images. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison. His sentence was later shortened because..

an appeals court said he couldn& #39;t be sentenced consecutively for the possession conviction and the receipt conviction because one is a lesser included offense. This man is at least the second person convicted of child pornography to die in federal prison so far from COVID.

I get that people won& #39;t shed a lot of tears at his demise. But to the extent that reformers believe we should base punishments on data and evidence, what is the evidence that 30-year sentences deter a 60-year-old married man from looking at terrible pictures?

What if this man got a 10-year sentence instead of 30? Would more people start viewing pictures of child pornography? Doesn& #39;t it seem like these long sentences have no specific or general deterrence value? Is 30 years just desserts? Do people who think substance abuse treatment..

is more effective than lengthy terms of incarceration not think we could find more effective ways to deal with a person who is attracted to child pornography than putting them in a cage for 3 decades? Ok, since this thread could lose me some followers anyway, let me add this:

A lot of people think they& #39;re brave for saying we need to rethink lengthy sentences for violent offenders. But bring up child pornography sentences and everyone gets very quiet. I don& #39;t know the answer, but I think this is an area where we need to ask some questions.