Maximum Mike Goes to Washington

But so what? Why not punish criminals to the full extent of the law? Who cares if it hurts some feelings around the office? Here’s where the trouble lies: Whopping sentences may be the stuff of stirring campaign rhetoric (I’m tough on crime! Look at my average sentence length!), but the fact is, they actually create more problems than they solve. Despite the throngs of street criminals shipped to the federal pen since Sullivan took office, violence continues unimpeded in urban Massachusetts. Worse, by disregarding individual circumstances and essentially sentencing crimes and not people, he’s alienated the mostly black and brown communities upon whose cooperation much of law enforcement relies. Stern, the former U.S. attorney, also federalized certain street crimes while serving under President Clinton—but he did so strategically. In one case, he put away for 20 years the gangster Freddie Cardoza, who used to taunt cops by flipping a single bullet like a coin. The sentence struck some as draconian, but it scared the hell out of local gang members, and Stern balanced it by working closely with the community to make sure they felt sufficiently invested in the legal process. The latter was a key component of Operation Ceasefire, the innovative program credited with dramatically reducing Boston’s murder rate in the 1990s.

Under Sullivan, however, these same communities have just seen kids being packed away to distant prisons for ever longer sentences, with scant effort made to explain why certain cases are moved from the state to the federal system. Factor in the baldly racist federal sentencing guidelines that punish crack cocaine far more severely than powder coke, as well as the lack of any appreciable drop in local violence, and you can see why some residents think they’re getting railroaded. The result is the “sort of cultural distance that you see captured in the Stop Snitchin’ stuff,” says John Klofas, a criminologist at New York’s Rochester Institute of Technology.

It goes without saying that Sullivan is carrying out—to the letter—the very policies the Bush administration expected of him. This bunch does, after all, excel in the manufacture of new and exciting forms of good-sounding imbecilities that cost huge amounts of money and end up exacerbating the ills they were intended to solve. But while it’s tempting to assume that he was just following the boss’s orders, let’s not forget that Sullivan’s been doing it this way since he was DA, which would seem to place him in the uniquely terrifying category of politicians who embrace bad policies not for political gain, but because they actually believe in them. Considering that Sullivan’s next stop, the ATF, finds itself at the center of a roiling controversy surrounding the White House’s policy of doing nothing to stop the flow of illegal guns into inner cities—and then screwing inner-city residents to the wall for using them—his impending appointment is unsettling, to say the least.

When you add it all up—the unstinting loyalty to an inept boss, the resolve for the sake of resolve, the apparent selective attachment to reality—it becomes obvious that far from being unqualified, Sullivan is, by the standards of the Bush White House, the perfect candidate for promotion. To that end, allow me to join our two fine senators in singing the praises of our new ATF director: Heck of a job, Sully.