Idea--Sentencing Guidelines or Community Standards

Societies and bureaucracies face the problem of uniformity versus diversity: given reality (yes, you have to accept the gift) strict rules don't work in all cases but basic fairness calls for similar cases to receive similar treatment. In the '80's Congress came up with sentencing guidelines for federal judges to ensure that someone convicted of a crime in Maine would receive roughly the same sentence as someone in Arizona. Last (?) term the Supreme Court struck down the guidelines as too restrictive, too much of an encroachment by the legislature into the judicial realm. Congress is now considering raising minimum sentences to achieve much the same result. Meanwhile, New York is essentially backing away from the Rockefeller minimum sentence law that was very hard on drug offenders.

I've an alternative to offer. As usual it's technocratic and incorporates principles of feedback and transparency. A parallel is found in from tax software, that compares your tax return to the national average. It is:

• have DOJ set up a central database/Internet application
• for each conviction, the federal judge enters data on the crime (the data would fit parameters of the sentencing guidelines, i.e., age of malefactor, prior convictions, gun involved, etc.)
• the judge enters his or her proposed sentence
• the software compares the sentence to all others given for the same crime and similar parameters.
• the judge can decide whether or not to adjust the sentence to fit more closely the national averages.
• the public could see the judge's record over time.
  

The theory is that this idea would permit judges to be free to use their discretion to fit oddball cases. Because judges and everyone else would have the feedback information, the tendence would be for sentences to cluster near the national average.