[soulbadguy]

> This is meant to be mitigating? What is this thought process? Who in their right mind is like "okay, a group of people broke into your home at night but your state shouldn't have been so hard on them for what ensued because akshually it was part of a whole nationwide trend at the time."

You analogy doesn't not hold, and in manyways point at the root of the issue. The point was to show that harsher punishment did not seems to result in meaningful effect on crime stats. It's fine to want harsher sentencing for some kind of emotional fuffilement, let's just not pretend that is helping in any otherways.