Shaun King was born in 1979, the year I graduated from college. Thirty-six years later, he wrote his first column for the New York Daily News, having gone legit from punditry at the Kos Daily to the News Daily.  When news broke that he would get this new soapbox from which to speak, I offered only one piece of advice: get the law right.

His first column appeared today, entitled How First Grade Teachers Are Helping To Set Prison Sentences All Over America.  He didn’t listen to me.

If you’re unfamiliar with King, he’s an activist, currently activisting in the Black Lives Matter movement.  Given my support for saving black lives from needless death at the hands of police, it might seem as if we were on the same team, or at least sympatico. But King’s brand of activisim involves simplistic platitudes supported by few facts, and usually a mind-numbingly wrong grasp of law.

When preaching to the choir, this isn’t a problem. First, they’re at least as clueless as to facts and law, and second, they only care if the outcome confirms their bias. How you got there, the validity of your assertions, the accuracy of your substance, means nothing.

But now that he’s writing for a New York City newspaper, even if it’s only the Daily Snooze, he’s going to play to a very different group. It will be much bigger. It will be just as stupid. It will not be limited to those who share his activist’s disdain for accuracy.  And if there was any doubt that he wasn’t going to seriously up his game, he proved it in his first column.

On our watch, the United States has become the incarceration nation. Call it the New Jim Crow, the prison industrial complex, the war on drugs, or pseudo slavery. But know this; our country now has just 5% of the world’s population, but an astounding 25% of its prisoners.

While the problem of mass incarceration isn’t exactly a secret, and King’s revelation is only about a decade too late, and it’s unclear whom he refers to in his first three words (on our watch? This began before you were born, kid. You weren’t watching), he sticks in the middle the “war on drugs.” His first column. His first paragraph. His first grossly erroneous assertion. An ominous start.

Jails and prisons should be seen as the modern day American Frankenstein and the question of who built the system and how we dismantle it should begin with something that should blow your mind.

Have you ever studied the science of prison sentencing?

Yes, indeed. But then, I went to school to learn such things, and then spent years actually working with, arguing over and dealing with the “science” of sentencing. You?

Let me rephrase that question. Have you ever read an article that methodically explains how certain crimes came to have certain lengths of incarceration as punishment? You can Google that all you want. It doesn’t really exist — not in a way that makes any kind of sense — because prison sentencing, in what most states curiously call their ‘departments of corrections’ isn’t based on any logical scientific framework, but is based more on first-grade mathematics.

Actually, there are some excellent articles on the subject.  Doug Berman’s blog is filled with them.  Criminal defense lawyers have been writing about it for years. Heck, even here.  But Shaun King apparently never read them, and if he doesn’t know about them, then they don’t exist. Kidz.

When I began digging, I soon learned that the overwhelming majority of prison sentences are given in multiples of five — not because a blue-ribbon panel determined that when the average human being spends five years on Rikers Island for stealing a backpack that it is statistically likely to positively correct the path of life that person was on, but prison sentences are doled out in fives because that’s how we like to count.

Rikers Island is a city jail, not a prison. This is kind of fundamental in the “science” of sentencing, that no one sentenced to five years is imprisoned on Rikers Island. Jails hold pre-trial detainees and misdemeanor defendants sentenced to one year or less. Felony defendants sentenced to more than a year go to prisons. Rikers is not a prison.

But more to the point, even if clueless. Assuming that sentences are doled out in multiples of five, is there a better number? Sevens maybe? Or threes?

And in fact, there was a “blue ribbon panel,” and it was called the United States Sentencing Guidelines Commission, and it came up with the Sentencing Guidelines. They were kind of a big thing, so it’s surprising no one told you about them since you’re pontificating about the “science” of sentencing.

What’s the most common prison sentence given out to someone convicted for a serious felony? It’s 25 to life. Sharanda Jones, a non-violent first time drug offender, comes to mind. She was given 25 years to life in federal prison for being the middle person in a Texas drug deal.

What? Cite? Granted, your use of “serious felony” is sufficiently vague to allow you to wiggle out of any critical thought, but 25 to life is the most common prison sentence? That’s nuts. No it’s not. If you’re going to make such an outlandish claim, you better be able to back it up. And you don’t.

Worse still, Sharanda Jones got 25 to life in federal prison?  No. There is no federal sentence of 25 to life. Aside from federal sentences being express in months, not years, there is no such thing as indeterminate sentencing in federal court. And Sharanda Jones was sentenced to life. You can’t just make this stuff up.

A large literature of psychological and economic research, however, has demonstrated that we’re largely insensitive to increases in punishments. Ten years in prison, in other words, does not seem “twice as bad” as five.

You bet ten years seems twice as bad as five to the person serving ten years.  And they’re counting on little people standing atop big soapboxes to clarify for a nation that believes life plus cancer would be a great sentence to fix this problem. You won’t do so when you have no clue what you’re talking about, publish wild inaccuracies in major New York dailies and conclusively prove that you can’t be taken seriously.

Shaun King, get your act together, learn what you’re talking about, stop making stuff up and don’t write nonsense. You have a chance to be heard outside your Hallelujah Chorus, but they’re going to expect more of you than fortune cookie wisdom backed up by fuzzy inaccuracies.

And if you can’t be bothered to get it right, then at least stop making it harder, and people stupider, for those of us who think accuracy matters. Don’t blow it.

Update: So did the message get through to Shaun King, the new Senior Justice Reporter at the Daily News? Well, something did, as he blocked me on twitter.