"Sometimes prison sentences, even the most severe, are a rational response to a crime. But often,sentences are the product of a political process in which politicians are scared of appearing soft on crime so they so they do not even question the reasonableness of a proposed criminal law. It is the norm, not the exception, for politicians to reflexively push for harsher sentences without considering empirical evidence about what level of sanction is necessary for deterrence or what impact a sentence will have on communities."

Although some imprisonment sentences are deemed equivalent to the crime, the majority of the time, sentences are determined based upon the  decision makers ability to appear competent and superior.Often this leads to the neglect of identifying the actual law for each crime.Instead, now politics has officially become influential over how a person gets penalized for a crime without referring back to evidence or the law proposed for that specific crime.