[jessriedel]

I think prison sentence length has generally been shown to be not very effective as a deterrent? My impression is that for most crimes the marginal effect of increasing the penalty by an additional year in prison is just to remove potential offenders from the free population without much decreasing the risk of any particular person offending. (And the sentences for bank robbery are long enough that by the time you get out you're too old to want to commit again anyways.)