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Washington State's sentencing reform in the early 1980s encompassed all felonies, including those resulting in sentences to prison and jail; the state also enacted the first and only sentencing guidelines for juvenile offenders. Several lessons are suggested from Washington's experience: sentencing guidelines can change sentencing patterns and can reduce disparities among offenders who are sentenced for similar crimes and have similar criminal histories; a sentencing commission does not operate as an independent political force, except when such delegation serves the legislature's purpose; guidelines are policy-neutral technologies that can be harnessed to achieve the legislature's will; in states where citizen initiatives are authorized, sentencing issues will appear on the ballot, attract political support, and make significant changes to sentencing policy; guidelines allow a state to set sentences with advance knowledge of the consequences to prison and jail populations; guidelines are likely to become more complex over time as legislators strive to respond to new perceptions of crime seriousness, while simultaneously paying attention to prison and jail costs.

Deciding how much time a person should spend in prison for a serious crime is an inherently moral and political act. And it is certainly coldhearted and philosophically problematic to view sentencing as just an agency problem with criminal defendants as objects of a system in which prison terms are simply outputs. So I will not even try to justify resorting to a narrow institutional perspective as a normative matter. But, for better or worse, those political actors with the greatest influence on sentencing regimes have to think in aggregate terms. While there is considerable normative appeal to the idea of courtroom actors, and particularly judges, crafting an individualized sentence for each defendant, we need also to recognize that for elected officials at the top of the prosecutorial hierarchy, sentencing – particularly sentencing after a negotiated guilty plea – presents just another iteration of the classic problem of administrative law: how to limit the ability of agents to take advantage of informational asymmetries to slack off or import their own policy preferences.

"After many decades of stability, the imprisonment rate in the United States quintupled between 1973 and 2003. Since then, nearly all states have adopted multiple reforms intended to reduce imprisonment, but the U.S. imprisonment rate has only decreased by a paltry two percent. Why are American sentencing reforms since 2000 been largely ineffective? Are tough mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders the primary reason our prisons are always full? This book offers a fascinating assessment of the wave of sentencing reforms adopted by dozens of states as well as changes at the federal level since 2000, identifying common themes among seemingly disparate changes in sentencing policy and highlighting recent reform efforts that have been more successful and may point the way forward for the nation as a whole. In The Failed Promise of Sentencing Reform, author Michael O'Hear exposes the myths that American prison sentencing reforms enacted in the 21st century have failed to have the expected effect because U.S. prisons are filled to capacity with nonviolent drug offenders as a result of the "war on drugs," and because of new laws that took away the discretion of judges and corrections officials. O'Hear then makes a convincing case for the real reason sentencing reforms have come up short: because they exclude violent and sexual offenders, and because they rely on the discretion of officials who still have every incentive to be highly risk-averse. He also highlights how overlooking the well-being of offenders and their families in our consideration of sentencing reform has undermined efforts to effect real change"--Provided by publisher.

This article discusses in detail the content and context of China's recent sentencing reform and its social, political, and criminal justice implications, as well as its limitations. The focus of China's criminal justice reforms over the past 37 years has been predominantly on the trial process; the sentencing process has been largely neglected. Revelations of widespread sentencing inconsistency led the Supreme People's Court (SPC) to initiate sentencing reform in 2005. The intent of the reform was to promote transparency in the sentencing process, ensure consistency in sentencing dispositions, and guard against inappropriate judicial leniency and severity via new sentencing procedural rules and guidelines limiting judges' sentencing discretion. In addition to discussing the new sentencing procedures and guidelines, this article also examines some hotly debated issues, including whether China's sentencing process should be completely separate from the trial process; the meaning of 'sentencing consistency' in the context of China's social and political development; and China's unique sentencing principles in comparison with the practice of some English-speaking jurisdictions.

The thesis of this Article is that the substantive criminal law is the missing element in sentencing reform. If comprehensive sentencing reform strategies are to have lasting effect, legislatures must reintroduce the criminal law to the sentencing process. This step will require a rekindled interest in a moral analysis of the substantive criminal law and the enactment of greatly reduced statutory sentence maximums, along with more conventional institutional changes to structure discretion and increase official accountability. Objections to American sentencing procedures range from the principled to the practical. Part II of this Article summarizes the basic objections that have influenced recent sentencing initiatives.All concern the unstructured discretion and absence of official accountability that characterize indeterminate sentencing. Part III then outlines the sentencing law reforms that have been proposed or adopted in response to these objections. Part IV asserts and at-tempts to demonstrate that sentencing in America has been divorced from the criminal law, and that present reform proposals are inadequate because they fail to address this separation. At trial, constitutional rights, the law of evidence, and the criminal burden of proof provide the defendant with important procedural safeguards. In addition, the state must meet all substantive criminal law requirements before the defendant can be convicted. Most convictions, however, result from guilty pleas. In these cases trial rights and protections are unimportant. Under an indeterminate sentencing scheme, defendants have virtually no rights at sentencing except for procedural rights such as the rights to counsel and to present and contest evidence. A court, therefore, can convict and sentence a defendant without ever applying substantive criminal law requirements. The new sentencing reforms have not ad-dressed this systemic flaw. Thus, part V of this Article argues that the logic and effect of sentencing reform proposals require that the criminal law ...

A collection of articles on sentencing reform in the United States, other English-speaking countries, and Western Europe, by national and international authorities. The articles originally appeared in "Overcrowding Times", and include issues such as sentencing policy, practice, and institutions

In the summer of 2001, the Home Office issued the Report of the Sentencing Review containing over 50 recommendations to reform the sentencing and parole systems in England and Wales. The White Paper, Justice for All, was published in 2002. The proposals constitute the most significant reform package in decades. A number of these proposals - such as the creation of a detailed sentencing guideline scheme, new sentencing options and recommendations to improve public knowledge of sentencing decisions - could well have a salutary impact on the sentencing process. However, the heart of the reform package contains an attempt to achieve the impossible: to reconcile within the same guiding statute (and sentencing guideline scheme) the conflicting sentencing philosophies of desert and utilitarianism. This article explores some consequences of the criminal record provisions by reference to the experience with sentencing reform in North America.