"If you desire to use your rage at our excessive crime rates to keep you in office, here is what you should do: Stress the need for more police, bewail the legalistic technicalities that set the guilty free, deplore the judicial tendency to impose sentimentally lenient sentences, frequently declare war on drugs or family violence or sex offenders, and promise that by larger doses of mandatory punishment you will send a powerful message to many varieties of criminals. Also, of course, in voting and in oratory, miss no occasion to favor capital punishment. You will not, as I am sure you appreciate, have any effect on crime rates, but your tenure in office will be more secure...

The coexistence of a guideline system and mandatory punishments, or mandatory minimum punishments, is a jurisprudential contradiction. If the sentencing commission is to be trusted, it must be trusted throughout. Mandatory sentences are a sin against the light; they deny the diversity of human behavior...

Press for the sentencing commission... to develop guidelines for the imposition of ''intermediate punishments,'' that is, punishments other than incarceration or ordinary probation [Ed: Singapore does this]"

--- Norval Morris, Guideline to sentencing reform