...Hon. Carlton W. Reeves In this piece, Chair of the U.S. Sentencing Commission Carlton W. Reeves makes a call for alternatives to incarceration. Noting that imprisonment was originally an “alternative” itself, insofar as it supplanted execution and slavery as forms of social control, Chair Reeves...

...Steven L. Chanenson; Douglas A. Berman Fifty years ago, Judge Marvin E. Frankel published a slim volume that has had an outsized and enduring impact on the criminal justice system in the United States and around the globe. In Criminal Sentences: Law without Order , Frankel captured the public’s...

...Albert W. Alschuler Although this article applauds many of the criticisms of sentencing practices contained in Judge Marvin Frankel’s influential book, Criminal Sentences: Law Without Order , it maintains that the reforms he championed failed to advance the goal of greater certainty in sentencing...

...Jelani Jefferson Exum As a sentencing scholar, Judge Frankel’s boldness and willingness to dream big about creating a different sentencing system have inspired me throughout my career. His willingness to call for reconstructing the sentencing system is an appeal that still rings true today. Despite...

...Marta Nelson Our addictions to carceral sentences take away people’s freedom, reduce safety through weakening communities, and disproportionately target Black people because our nation’s conceptions of who needs to be punished, deterred, or locked away are so tied to anti-Blackness...

...Steven L. Chanenson In the summer of 2022, various aspects of the federal sentencing world seemed frozen in time. The U.S. Sentencing Commission couldn’t respond to vital legislative or practical developments because it lacked a quorum, as it had for more than three years. Meanwhile, federal...

...Erica Zunkel; Jaden M. Lessnick In a harsh and inflexible system that offers few opportunities for judges to reevaluate the sentences they impose when circumstances warrant, federal compassionate release holds great promise. When the First Step Act was passed in 2018, sentencing judges were freed...

...Kelly Lyn Mitchell This essay on the obligations of sentencing commissions to constantly reassess their policies is adapted from the speech given by Kelly Lyn Mitchell, Chair of the Minnesota Sentencing Guidelines Commission, upon receiving the Richard P. Kern Memorial Award from the National...

... sentencing federal criminal law prison elderly The Door Is Still Open: Compassionate Release and the Aging Prisoner As COVID-19 threatened the lives of those incarcerated, compassionate release motions emerged as a critical mechanism to seek the release of those individuals most vulnerable to severe...

...Elizabeth Berger; Kent S. Scheidegger In response to prison overcrowding concerns in recent years, many U.S. officials have undertaken efforts to reduce sentence lengths for certain crimes. However, it is unclear how these changes affect recidivism rates. Among the research on incarceration...

...Steven L. Chanenson; Douglas A. Berman As the famed legal scholar Yogi Berra once observed, “It’s like deja vu all over again.” Those wise words can describe the U.S. Sentencing Commission. Once again, we find ourselves with a fresh, full-strength Commission brimming with all the promise...

...Christine S. Scott-Hayward; Connie Ireland Decades of research on the impact of pretrial detention demonstrates that pretrial detention has consistent negative impacts on case outcomes. In particular, in the federal system, detained defendants are more likely to be sentenced to prison...

...Jacob Schuman This special issue of the Federal Sentencing Reporter is dedicated to community supervision in the federal criminal justice system. Federal law recognizes two justifications for community supervision: public safety and rehabilitation. Yet these justifications are in tension...

... rehabilitation. © 2022 Vera Institute of Justice. All rights reserved. 2022 supervision sentencing criminal rehabilitation law judges judicial reentry The Judicial Role in Supervision and Reentry JACOB SCHUMAN Assistant Professor, Penn State Law Judges and courts play a key role in federal...

... something else: greater attention to the humanity of offenders at the sentencing proceeding. Sentencing now is often a routine, unreasoned affair; even draconian sentences are sometimes imposed with little or no explanation of the goals they are meant to serve. Respect for dignity demands more than...

... as fines, penalties, and restitution are typically non-dischargeable in bankruptcy, regardless of their purpose, as long as they were contained in a sentencing order in a criminal case. Over the past four decades, the need to fund cash-strapped state and local governments generally, and to pay for mass...

...Hon. Lynn Adelman In my paper, I discuss what I believe is the most effective approach to sentencing drug defendants. I start with the proposition that in many, if not most cases, incarcerating drug offenders does more harm than good. Imprisonment contributes to mass incarceration, does not deter...

...Colleen M. Berryessa Using a national sample of U.S. adults ( N = 371), this study experimentally examines (1) public support for the use of strategies that provide early release (i.e., “second chance” mechanisms) to individuals serving long-term prison sentences for drug crimes; and (2) how levels...

...Sarah Brady Siff The early history of drug sentences in California provides a quintessential example of structural racism in law. The demands of white voters to escalate penalties for drug crimes followed a pattern of collective myth making and value signaling that insisted opiates, cocaine...

...John Gleeson The president’s power to grant clemency is but one feature of a sentence-correction ecosystem. But the abolition of federal parole in the 1980s left the clemency power as the only way to correct lawfully imposed sentences for the simple reason that they are too damn long. This article...