As we all know, one of the biggest arguments against mass incarceration is that so many people are packed off to prison for nonviolent offenses that it doesn't leave room for people who really have forfeited the right to live among us.
Quite possibly the worst example of this is what happened to James Aneckstein, an apartment manager in Manchester, New Hampshire who oversaw an older building that used lead paint. I learned about this case on Forensic Files; the full episode is available on YouTube. He never told his tenants that the lead in the paint exceeded current limits, as required by law. He got caught in 2000 when Sunday Abek, a three-year-old refugee from Sudan, died from eating paint chips on the porch that she thought were candy. Toxicology tests revealed that she had 40 times the lethal amount of lead for a child in her system--the first such death in the United States in 10 years.
When Aneckstein found out about Sunday's death, he tried to cover himself by cutting and pasting his tenants' signatures from other documents onto federally required disclosure forms. But it turned out that her mother, Mary Alorout, could barely write English, so Aneckstein forged her signature. For all of this, he only got 15 months in federal prison and a $40,000 fine. Woefully inadequate, I say. He knew that families with children were living there, and failed to notify them. That's the definition of depraved-heart murder.
I was reminded of this in two recent cases where people who horribly abused children got outrageously light sentences. In my neck of the woods, Wanda Larson, the former child protection worker who abused several kids under her care, only got 17 months in prison and five years' probation after pleading guilty. Even worse, since she had been in jail awaiting trial for almost two years on half a million dollar's bond, with credit for time served she could go home as early as Wednesday. This for a woman who allowed a boy under her care to be chained outside in freezing weather with a dead chicken around his neck, and kept kids in a house with feces on the floor and no running water. As I've said several times, that isn't a sentence--indeed, it's barely a phrase.
And just last week, Brandy Kangas and Scott Suggs, a couple near Fredericksburg, Virginia pleaded guilty to child neglect charges after they left their three kids in a locked room for 24 hours a day and fed them through a locked gate. When Spotsylvania County detectives and social workers rescued the kids, they found feces and urine stains on the carpet and a foul smell in the room. The kids also had rashes on them. They were sentenced to six years in prison--but at the request of prosecutors, that sentence was suspended. Why? According to Spotsylvania County Commonwealth's Attorney William Neely, since the kids weren't physically abused and appeared to be well-nourished, they weren't physically abused--so therefore, it wasn't technically abuse under Virginia law. Anyone who works with children would laugh at that argument. In what world is this not something that merits jail time?
There is something fundamentally wrong when relatively minor offenses get you years in jail, but monsters like Aneckstein, Larson, Suggs and Kangas are able to get slaps on the wrist.