I've rarely seen a prison term issued by a US court which I have not found to be excessive relative to my experience with sentences in Germany.
The statistic of the total number of prisoners in the US per capita is well-known and gives us a strong indication that sentencing must be a factor. Still, I'd love to see some official data on this.
It's not as if these laws arise in a vacuum.
Ross Ulbricht got double life imprisonment + 40 years for a non violent crime.
It was, in fact, pay of the allegations of the crimes he was charged with, and it explicitly was a sentencing factor. He wasn't charged with, say, attempted murder or conspiracy to commit murder for the alleged murder-for-hire scheme, though.
It was used as an aggravation factor (if that's the right word) at sentencing, that's true. But he wasn't charged with it.
Does that really sound logical to you?
> Federal prosecutors alleged that Ulbricht had paid $730,000 in murder-for-hire deals targeting at least five people,[29] allegedly because they threatened to reveal Ulbricht's Silk Road enterprise.[37][38] Prosecutors believe no contracted killing actually occurred.[29] Ulbricht was not charged in his trial in New York federal court with any murder-for-hire,[29][39] but evidence was introduced at trial supporting the allegations.[29][38] The evidence that Ulbricht had commissioned murders was considered by the judge in sentencing Ulbricht to life, and was a factor in the Second Circuit's decision to affirm the life sentence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Ulbricht#Silk_Road,_arres...
eg. If you punch someone in an altercation, they might fall and hit their head and die - and people have been jailed for doing so - but if the same punch happens to not cause a fall, it will likely result in minimal bruising and perhaps a concussion that will heal in a few weeks.
Do these crimes deserve the same sentence or does outcome matter?
If you shoot at me with intention to kill, and miss, attempted murder almost always carries the same weight as murder so outcome does not matter.
If you punch me in the face on top of a cliff, and I stumbke and fall to my death, your intention may only have been tissue damage, but you were careless as to (reasonable potential) consequences.
And yes the falling and hitting ones head is iirc seen as a reasonably predictable consequence.
Not a perfect example, but let's say an addict robs someone on the street, buys a big score of her favorite drug and then sells some of that to an addict friend. Would that be considered three strikes?
What can happen in certain states, is that repeat offenders are hit with escalating prison terms each time they are convicted (the classic example are the three-strikes-your-out laws), whereby someone can be sentenced to a life term.
In those cases, sentences don't translate to actual prison terms since non-violent offenders are routinely paroled.
There's still a lot of heavy handedness, and I question the justice of escalating sentencing, but the comments above create a false impression of the US justice system.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-strikes_law