A *Year*?!? For *THAT*?!?!?!

So, a fan ran onto the field at the MLB All-Star Game at Citi Field on Tuesday. It was apparently a Twitter dare; he said he'd do it if he got 1000 re-tweets, which he did, so he did. As a result, he has been charged with "interfering with a professional sporting event," which as my dad points out is a curious thing to make a criminal offense; it's a rather blatant example of the state just acting as the private security force for powerful private organizations. (Although I suppose MLB isn't exactly a private organization...) But here's my point: the penalty he faces, in addition to a potential $5000 in civil penalties, presumably from suits by MLB and maybe also the Mets, is a $1000 criminal fine and... up to a year in jail!

A year.

That's right.

Of course, it is eminently not right. This is insane. This is the kind of thing for which 30-day or 15-day sentences were invented. This is basically a misdemeanor. It's someone making a bit of trouble and being a bit immature, and not in one of the ways that people can be immature in and it's fine because it doesn't really affect anyone else. Running onto the field at the All-Star Game does not suggest that you're someone with a particularly criminal tendency or that you're dangerous, although of course we're not supposed to lock people up because we have reason to think they might become dangerous criminals in the future anyway. It's basically a harmless (in the grand scheme of things) prank; I was watching the TV coverage pretty closely and I didn't even notice that this had happened. So yeah, throw the guy in a cell for a couple of weeks and let him think over why what he did was stupid, but don't ruin his life.

Because you know what turns people into dangerous criminals? One thing is having their lives ruined. Another is spending a year in the slammer with people who actually are dangerous criminals, and who make it difficult to survive without essentially becoming one yourself. In a sense this particular incident is trivial, because it's about one guy who ran onto the field at the All-Star Game. But in two other senses it is anything but: first, because it might honestly ruin that guy's life for no good reason, and second because the way we treat criminal "justice" in this country is insane. Jail sentences have been inflated beyond all proportion and it's one of the worst things about our country. It's divorced from any purpose at this point, not even pure vengeful retribution I think because no one can maintain that Dylan McCue-Masone's heinous crimes demand harsh retribution.

In fact, to be completely honest I think the only interpretation of this particular sentence is as a form of something I saw in a description of the eighteenth-century English legal system: terror. The courts of justice are being used to allow the rich and powerful to keep the little people in a state of terror, knowing that if they put one toe over the line set by their betters, they will be crushed. This is a philosophically indefensible thing for a government to be doing, and it needs to stop.