This article updates the author’s previous survey of guidelines systems, published in this journal in 1999, and reviews what these reforms have and have not accomplished. Sentencing guidelines developed by an independent sentencing commission are currently being used in 17 states, the federal courts, and the District of Columbia. The majority of these systems have also replaced parole release discretion with defined good-time reductions for compliance with prison disciplinary rules and assigned prison programming, and this combination of sentencing and parole reform has been endorsed by the American Bar Association and the American Law Institute. The article summarizes and critiques the many variations among guidelines systems. Some relate to scope -- which crimes and sentencing issues are regulated; others concern design details – how the system actually works. The article identifies five central features of a well-designed guidelines system: a permanent, balanced, independent, and adequately funded sentencing commission; typical-case presumptive sentences and departure criteria; a hybrid sentencing theory that recognizes and harmonizes retributive and crime control purposes; balance between the competing benefits of rules and discretion; and sentence recommendations informed by resource and demographic impact assessments. Balance is also needed in terms of commission composition, and between the influence of the commission, the legislature, and case-level actors. But even if all of these features cannot be adopted, some form of structured sentencing is essential; completely discretionary sentencing is unacceptable. And in the past four decades, no competing structured sentencing model of comparable scope has been adopted or even seriously proposed.

American jurisdictions seeking to reduce their heavy reliance on prison sentences should emulate European practices, but they should also learn from practices already found in some American states, and in all states at earlier times in our history. European countries make much less use of custodial sentences by employing alternatives such as prosecutorial diversion, fines and day fines as the sole sanction, suspended custodial sentences, and community service or training orders imposed as conditions of probation. These European practices should not be dismissed on the assumption that they are “too foreign”; each of them is well-known in the United States, and their use may be more common than we imagine. If we had better data on these practices – which we should – jurisdictions that aren’t often using them could learn from those that are. There may also be uniquely American practices that help to explain why some states have been able to maintain consistently low prison rates, or to lower their formerly high rates. One such practice is the use of sentencing guidelines combined with parole abolition, developed and monitored by an adequately funded independent sentencing commission, and matching prison use with available prison capacity. Finally, we should learn from our collective past; the United States has not always had extremely high “mass incarceration” rates, nor has it always had rates much higher than those in Europe. Americans should not accept, as the new normal, prison rates five times higher than those that prevailed for fifty years prior to the mid-1970s.