In yet another screwy screed, Georgetown Law’s Bill Otis at Crime & Consequences, who fancies himself a leader in the war against the Smarter Sentencing Act, boosted by the recognition of C&C as the “top-rated pro-prosecution blog” according to a scam link-bait survey that’s been desperately trying to find fools pathetic enough link back to it, says the feds can’t reduce their prison population.  It just won’t work.

In debating the Heroin Dealers Bonanza Act Smarter Sentencing Act, I hear one question again and again:   Since some states like Texas and Michigan have reduced their prison populations over the last few years and  have seen the decline in crime continue, why can’t the federal prison system do the same?

Who, exactly, Otis debates with, aside from the voices he hears in his own head and the occasional dog, is unclear. But as strawmen go, it’s a fair question, even if framed in a self-serving manner.

Even if prison reduction programs work for the states, they are not going to work for the feds.  The feds prosecute precisely the kind of drug gangs, and drug offenders, who are the most violent, the most entrenched, and the most prone to recidivism.  The kind of offender you see coming out of the county courthouse is a choir boy compared to what you see coming out of the federal courthouse.

The lie has done more to obscure reality and prevent effective change, that federal prosecutions are somehow limited to drug kingpins and murderous conspiracies.  It’s a myth, like the child super-predators following the Central Park 5, who were subsequently found to be innocent.

The feds prosecute the typical drug mule with no prior convictions trying to feed her children far more than the outlier kingpin. They prosecute the very same run of the mill street corner pot sellers as state court.  If they take down a 25-person conspiracy, chances are 24 of them are nobodies and that “main man” is slightly less of a nobody who runs the stash house, where some other nobody drops off a suitcase of drugs to be sold on the street at $10 a pop. Kingpins!!!

Not that these are good things, but they are hardly “the most violent, the most entrenched, and the most prone to recidivism.”  This is a fantasy that the hard-core haters like Otis keep mumbling to themselves.

The New York Times has an expose on another realm where the mythological rhetoric has informed the nation of how only the worst criminals get deported.  The “most violent, most entrenched, most prone to recidivism.”  For traffic tickets.

With the Obama administration deporting illegal immigrants at a record pace, the president has said the government is going after “criminals, gang bangers, people who are hurting the community, not after students, not after folks who are here just because they’re trying to figure out how to feed their families.”

Mind you, that’s not the rhetoric of the extremes, like Bill Otis, but of the current Democractic administration.

But a New York Times analysis of internal government records shows that since President Obama took office, two-thirds of the nearly two million deportation cases involve people who had committed minor infractions, including traffic violations, or had no criminal record at all. Twenty percent — or about 394,000 — of the cases involved people convicted of serious crimes, including drug-related offenses, the records show.

Eighty percent of those deported weren’t the mythological “gang bangers,” but people stopped for traffic violations.  The myth starts to fall apart with actual information. But what about the 20% which involves “people convicted of serious crimes, including drug-related offenses”?

The shift is subtle, but it’s there. “Serious crimes” includes drug-related offenses, like the dreaded smoking a joint or getting caught with a gram of weed.  Kingpins!!!  It’s not that there aren’t occasional busts of significant, and violent, drug dealers, but they are remarkably few and far between.

Even within this tainted 20%, the vast majority of defendants are harmless and, frankly, insignificant players in the scheme of drugs.  No distinction is made here between the types of drugs involved or the roles played.  Buyer or seller?  Dealer or mule, or even hanger-on?  When children are hungry, parents will take on a job that pays cash so they can feed them.  It’s wrong, but to pretend they’re dangerous is laughable.

Yet, by employing the rhetoric of the myth, much like Otis with his wild-eyed hyperbole, the public continues to labor under the absurd belief that only the really bad people are being deported, the super-villains. Do these sound like super-villains to you?

The records show the largest increases were in deportations involving illegal immigrants whose most serious offense was listed as a traffic violation, including driving under the influence. Those cases more than quadrupled from 43,000 during the last five years of President George W. Bush’s administration to 193,000 during the five years Mr. Obama has been in office. In that same period, removals related to convictions for entering or re-entering the country illegally tripled under Mr. Obama to more than 188,000.

That last group, the 188,000 removals for “serious offenses,” committed only one offense: entering the United States illegally.  There is certainly an argument to be made that people who enter illegally are properly removed, even if they’ve been here for a lifetime, paid taxes, raised American children and do the nasty work that Americans won’t do because they feel it’s beneath their dignity.

What is not acceptable is to pretend they are “criminals, gang bangers, people who are hurting the community,” and perpetuate the myth that we’re only talking about murderous drug kingpins.

Much as it might be easy to believe that it’s only the nuts like Otis who are making these absurd claims, perpetuating the myth in order to further their agenda of locking up as many people as possible, the same lie is being used pervasively by Obama as well.  It’s a myth.  It’s untrue.  And yet no one has been willing to put the lie to it.

And so the public, and our elected representatives, continues to debate issues based upon the great myth that we’re only talking about super-villains, because it would be an impossible to be so harsh and cause so much damage if we strayed from the myth.