The Jonathan Majors Sentence is Exactly What BlackLivesMatter Was Calling For
if you want to end mass incarceration, you have to accept greater leniency for people who do genuinely bad things
Earlier this month, the actor Jonathan Majors was sentenced to a year of domestic violence counseling after being found guilty of assaulting his ex-girlfriend. The response to the sentencing was muted. While there was plenty of social media chatter, some of it anguished, there were few thinkpieces to be found. Much of the cultural media seemed to find the whole situation to be sordid, and many of the places that you might expect to cover a domestic violence trial ran only brief aggregations of news items about the sentencing. (It would certainly have attracted more commentary in 2018, but that was a different country and a different media and a different internet.) I often turn to Reddit to get a sense of what people are saying about current events; at r/news, unsurprisingly, there was a good deal of angst over a sentence that was perceived to be too light. Twitter had similar thoughts, as did TikTok. Mostly though people seem to want to move on. The Cut devoted an entire piece to hemming and hawing about this type of program, maintaining a permanent ambivalence, but it doesn’t come out and directly object to the Majors sentence.
In general I didn’t hear much outrage. And I think that might be a sign of progress. Because while I certainly understand having mixed feelings about the sentence, it’s exactly the kind of alternative to prison that we need to solve mass incarceration. Prosecutors didn’t ask for jail time, the judge didn’t hand down any, and a first-time Black offender was diverted out of the penal system. That’s exactly what those of us who support comprehensive criminal justice reform have been calling for, these past years. Isn’t it?