Is Criminal Justice Politically Feasible?

concepts. Compared to the visual, personalized fear of Horton, the American public vividly remembered that a convicted black man brutally raped a white female, and attacked her fiance while out on furlough, not that the circumstances were unusual, and specifically chosen. B. The Function of Heavier Sentencing If this line of reasoning is right, then the outrage dynamic ensures in the areas where it can get a grip that heavier sentencing is the only stable equilibrium. Let there be a departure from that level of sentencing and, sooner or later, it will tend to be reversed. Heavier sentencing will be like an attractor that drags sentencing policy in its direction—at least with crimes that attract 7. Amos Tversky it connects, at least under current institutions, with a function served by heavier sentencing. The pursuit of criminal justice has an inbuilt resistance to policy-making reform, even reform of the kind that Montesquieu called for over two hundred years ago.