Too Hard on Kiddie Porn?

I know, for most people the obvious answer to that question is "of course not," but bear with me. Today's Wall Street Journal has an interesting article on the recent increase in the length of federal kiddie porn sentences. The average sentence length for possession type offenses has increased from three years in 1994 to seven years in 2006. That's due largely to increased mandatory minimums enacted by Congress and the Sentencing Commission jacking up the accompanying Guidelines to keep pace.

Judges have taken notice and have started to question them:

The sentencing guidelines for child pornography crimes "do not appear to be based on any sort of [science] and the Court has been unable to locate any particular rationale for them beyond the general revulsion that is associated with child exploitation-related offenses," wrote Robert W. Pratt, a U.S. district judge in Des Moines, Iowa, in a case earlier this year. In that case, he gave a seven-year sentence to one defendant, even though the advisory guidelines called for a minimum of roughly 18 years.

The issue really is whether people who only possess or, at most, traffic in kiddie porn made by someone else are dangerous predators who will eventually assault a real child:

Fred Berlin, founder of the Johns Hopkins Sexual Disorders Clinic, says many of his patients have a "voyeuristic" interest in child pornography. "Absent any evidence that they have done something other than view child porn, I'm not prepared to conclude they are at a heightened risk of physically abusing a child," he says.

But Ernie Allen, who heads the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, argues the sentences are simply "catching up to reality." Hundreds of thousands of Americans currently possess illegal images and may be tempted to generate child pornography themselves -- by molesting children and taping the acts -- to gain acceptance in Internet groups whose members share images, he says.

We've seen this play before, with crack sentencing: Congress got caught up in a panic about crack cocaine and enacted draconian mandatory minimums (duly adopted by the Sentencing Commission). Almost all the assumptions made to support those penalties have been proven false, but it's difficult to get Congress to step back once it's overreached on an issue like that.

Before we go locking up another segment of society that, keep in mind, hasn't directly harmed someone (producers are a whole other story, obviously), we should make sure we know what we're doing.