Except no one is encouraging maximum sentences and ruthless prosecution across the board. People want judges to stop handing out lenient sentences to rapists because they don’t want to ruin their futures, because they consistently show more empathy and sympathy for those rapists than they do for their victims. Rapists…

This culture of mass incarceration has so shaped our minds that when a judge, like Judge Persky in this case, undertakes a holistic sentencing analysis that accounts for both the victim and the convicted, we still insist on arbitrary, lengthy terms of incarceration as the response to crime.