[This appeared sometime in 1989 in the Santa Rosa (Cal.) Press-Democrat] Stopping The Sausage Machine A few years ago, Tom Wolfe's novel Bonfire of the Vanities described the New York City criminal justice system as a sausage machine; every day, hundreds of defendants were arrested, jailed, arraigned, tried, and sentenced -- like cattle in a slaughterhouse. Like a factory grinding meat into sausage, it needs fresh meat all the time, because the process of grinding out sausage has become more important than the result. I recently spent Sunday afternoon studying the minimum sentences which our Penal Code allows judges to give -- and it makes me suspect that our justice system has become like that sausage machine -- our Legislature is keeping meat flowing through the machine, not protecting public safety. The sentences for rape and kidnapping used to be severe. Repeatedly, I found that while sentences were usually made stiffer in the first half of this century, most sentences for violent crimes were dramatically reduced in 1976 -- to the point that a cynic could wonder if the goal was to increase the velocity of felons through the system. I picked 32 crimes, in no particular order, which are usually considered serious: murder, mayhem, manslaughter, kidnapping, robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, rape, and a few weapons offenses. I found the violent crimes (rape, voluntary manslaughter, involuntary manslaughter, drunk driving vehicular manslaughter) were among the shortest sentences. The minimum sentence you can receive in California for rape (PC 264) is only three years. Get drunk and kill someone with a car (PC 193), and the minimum sentence is 16 months. Assault with a deadly weapon other than a gun (PC 245(a)(1)) has no minimum sentence. On the other hand, some crimes where there is no victim are severely punished. Sell an assault rifle to a law- abiding citizen (PC 12280(a)), and the minimum sentence is four years. In fact, of the 32 crimes I studied, only five had more serious minimum sentences: murder (first and second degree), kidnapping someone under 14, and two different variants of assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer. Selling an assault rifle is a crime in which, even by the most tortured logic, the odds of there ever being a victim is less than 1/2 of 1%. The California Legislature, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that this crime is a more serious offense than rape, robbery, or manslaughter -- crimes which, in each and every case, have a clearly identifiable victim who bleeds, who suffers, who cries, who dies. The October 29th Press-Democrat contained an article about two men named Poe and Faber, recently convicted of rape. Both men had prior gang rape convictions. Both men had served the rather short sentences that our legislators consider appropriate for rape. Poe had even been convicted in 1986 for assault with a deadly weapon, and by 1988 was out of prison again. Traditionally, liberals respond to the call for longer sentences for violent criminals with, "Where are you going to put them? It's too expensive to keep them in prison." Is it really cheaper to, in the case of David Earnest Poe, arrest, book, and try him three times in the last 14 years for violent crimes? Is the suffering of the victims worth nothing, in terms of the costs to the society? Are our legislators simply too stupid to see that it isn't cost effective to keep running the same savages through our criminal justice system again and again, causing suffering to their victims? I don't think so. The real problem is that the suffering of a rape victim, the continuing nightmares of a robbery victim, a young man beaten to death at an ATM in San Francisco, are too remote from their concerns. California's Legislature has the power to solve much of the violent crime problem. Prison space must be reserved for those crimes which have a distinct, identifiable victim, and use other methods of punishment for the victimless crimes (if we punish them at all). But does our Legislature want to solve the problem? After reviewing our Penal Code, with the absurd situation where rape is a less serious offense than sale of a semiautomatic rifle, I cannot believe that our Legislature has any interest in solving the problem. The sausage keeps getting ground out -- and victims continue to suffer. ----- Clayton Cramer is a software engineer with a manufacturer of telecommunications equipment in Petaluma. His first book, By The Dim And Flaring Lamps: The Civil War Diary of Samuel McIlvaine, was published in 1990.