I can think the book is awful at the same time I think that sentencing in the US is probably a mess (I say probably because I'm not a careful observer of it).
The book claims "How can the average American commit three arguable felonies in the course of a given day?". Yet your example of charge stacking is contingent on carrying a felonious amount of drugs, something the average (mean, median and mode!) American avoids doing.
If you click to the website provided above, the first example is of someone "convicted for using plastic bags to transport lobsters". If you look up the case, they were convicted of criminal conspiracy and smuggling, with the horrible plastic bag charge being stacked on:
And the plastic bag charge isn't about the plastic bags, it's about Honduras having laws designed to protect their lobster fisheries from abusive exports (fisheries are harmed by over harvesting, but someone looking to make near term profits might not care about that, so regulation is sensible).
> Yet your example of charge stacking is contingent on carrying a felonious amount of drugs
It's incredibly easy as the felony amounts have been made very small. Further, the police generally weigh the container the drugs were/are in so if you have a plastic container that weighs 1 ounce, prettymuch no matter the quantity of drugs inside it's a felony.
Also, the estimated number or drug users is 23.9 million Americans as of 2012. While that might mean that the "average" American isn't a drug user, it does mean that there are more drug users than say Asians in the US and a very large percentage of the Black or Hispanic/Latino populations.
By your logic, we shouldn't worry about those folks because they aren't the average american (mean, median, mode) and yet the civil rights movement arguably disagrees with you.
Furthermore, when it comes to convictions the average American isn't a felon, won't ever go before the court, etc. And yet we offer these people protections (various Amendments to the Constitution, various Federal, State and local laws, Miranda rights, etc) even though they're not average as per your definition.
Given that the justice system is setup the way it is, your casual dismissal of it seems strange.
My argument is that a particular statement is not backed up by the book it is used to sell. You've twisted that pretty far to end up with the opportunity to moralize at me.
My logic isn't that we should ignore sentencing problems in the US, my logic is that bringing bullshit book marketing into the discussion is counter productive.
I'd be interested in exactly which of my statements you view as a casual dismissal of the problems with the justice system.
I said The book claims "How can the average American commit three arguable felonies in the course of a given day?". Yet your example of charge stacking is contingent on carrying a felonious amount of drugs, something the average (mean, median and mode!) American avoids doing., but that wasn't to dismiss anything about the sentencing in those situations, it was to point out that you probably don't want to argue the blurb from the book if you are having a discussion about drug sentencing.
The book claims "How can the average American commit three arguable felonies in the course of a given day?". Yet your example of charge stacking is contingent on carrying a felonious amount of drugs, something the average (mean, median and mode!) American avoids doing.
If you click to the website provided above, the first example is of someone "convicted for using plastic bags to transport lobsters". If you look up the case, they were convicted of criminal conspiracy and smuggling, with the horrible plastic bag charge being stacked on:
http://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2000/November/647enrd....
And the plastic bag charge isn't about the plastic bags, it's about Honduras having laws designed to protect their lobster fisheries from abusive exports (fisheries are harmed by over harvesting, but someone looking to make near term profits might not care about that, so regulation is sensible).