Monica Conyers' Recommended Jail Sentence

is 46-57 months. If the judge is to agree with this recommendation Ms. Conyers will serve within a stone's throw of the maximum allowed as a condition of her guilty plea.

I think it would be incomplete to think of her crime as being wrapped around the illegal collection of some $60,000 or $70,000 in various shake downs. It would be more fitting to define it as her one small part in a multi-generational larceny that took a once proud city and removed from it its viability and with it, its self esteem.

I'll let others decide if this is justice for Conyers, but the city of Detroit, if it is ever to receive justice, would need a lot more jail time to be served by thousands if not tens of thousands of corrupted public officials, businessmen, teachers, and other various thugs that absconded with the peoples' trust, money, and futures through much of the past five decades.

Many of the guilty lay moldering in the grave while many of their victims still live within a crime riddled and service starved city incapable of raising the bare revenues needed to haul its own waste. It would be justice, I suppose, to think of Conyers as having suffered the fate of her own actions--yet this justice benefits few souls still living among those mean streets.

What she did is already done, and who she did it to is already a victim. Forty six to fifty seven months might very well be justice for Monica Conyers, but her city and her victims, deserve her to receive a whole lot more.