I am sorry for the long post. I've thought a lot about this, and I just want to put some points out:
You know what I never understood about bans is that if the first punishment is 1 month, then won't that lead to players leaving and not joining (in that respective division)?
Why would you want to ban someone for 1 month, disregaring egregious acts? What is the point other than, "Teaching them a lesson"? There is no good justification other than both your own satisfaction of banning someone and boosting your "numbers". Rather, consider smaller (2 matches, 1 week, 2 weeks max) first-term bans with compounding time afterwards? A great example of this would be the following:
I'm a bad person and I knowingly used a game exploit.
An admin bans me for 1 week (2 matches).
I don't learn my lesson; I again knowingly used another game exploit.
I recieve a ban for 2 weeks (another 4 matches).
...ect, doubling my ban time each instance
This results in me either learning a lesson that I shouldn't use a game exploit or it results in me becoming essentially permanently banned. 2 matches is already enough for some teams to get really screwed over, why would you want to increase that on the initial ban? If the acts of a single person means the team has to scramble to get someone to cover for the next few months or more, that kinda seems like a punishment to the whole team. Why would you want to punish the team? 2 ringers for 1 week I think is fine, but if the person keeps doing it then it may be likely that the team leader would cut that individual. This kinda solves the problem with people who keep pushing your limits, because eventually no team would want to play with that individual. Also, why is it that bans are always weeks or months late? What happened to consequences for actions? It certainly feels like you can go a long way before bans (Not talking AC here) are actually applied, thus giving the illusion that an individuals' actions were justified, until oops! We're banning you now for something that happened a week ago.
I also want to talk the topic of ban reasons. If punishments and their reasons made sense, then it would reduce the people 'targeting' or otherwise pushing your boundaries. Your boundaries could be as stiff as steel and as clear as glass, and people would still want to cross that line beacuse they want to see you ban players, like a joke. There's no reason to keep information from people for your own good. There is no reason to create long paragraphs of ban reasons. Instead, becoming more clear and specific with examples of rules (this is done, but not very much- I'll give some credit) broken will greatly help reduce the amount of times someone gets confused by a ban and makes it a larger deal than it should.
Consider applying different strategies to punishments, and you'll see a much greater interest in the league as a whole. Your whole reasoning and thought process is ran by a total of 3 people, and it's easily your weakest link. I really hope that with this viewpoint and GeneralNick's post that a goal is made to help reform punishments to actually solve issues that are being seen now.