I have come to understand this brutal sentencing structure, or at least some of the reasoning. It appears to be the &quot;other side&quot; of the question &quot;how many guilty men should go free for how many innocent men&quot;? The strength of the punishment is proportional to how hard it is to convict with certainty. The aggressive sentencing is greatly exaggerated to form a disincentive for all the men we cannot convict.<p>Justice strikes me of an area where humans tend to reason intuitively. It&#x27;s also an area that is extremely difficult to measure in any quantitative way. I would be highly interested in understanding what drives existing criminals--my own intuition tells me these sentences are not very preventative, but allow for the illusion of making progress against crime, particularly violent crime. (These people are monsters! Thank god they&#x27;re gone for life, or the dangerous part of their life.)