This would never happen to a man

A Dallas woman who beat her 2-year-old daughter and glued the toddler's hands to a wall because she was struggling with potty training was sentenced Friday to 99 years in prison.

Look, what the mother did was awful and I'm glad the child is still alive. But she got this sentence because she's a woman -- and let's remember she's only 23. Oh, and there's this:

Prosecutors portrayed Escalona as an unfit mother with a history of violence. They played recordings in which Escalona as a teenager threatened to kill her mother. They said she had been a gang member and that she started smoking marijuana at age 11.

Well, there you go. Smoking marijuana?! Give her 99 years! This is, in effect, the same sentence that Jerry Sandusky and Bernie Madoff got: death in jail -- and they're old guys. It's way out of proportion to what happened. Give the woman 15 years if you feel vindictive, but not 99 years. I see an echo of people's irrational notion of hell in this sentence. If she was a man, she never would have gotten such a long sentence. It's all about American society's insane notions of "womanhood" and "motherhood". People are twits when it comes to women.