Vera Institute of Justice presents “A New Paradigm for Sentencing in the United States”

I am very pleased to see the official publication of this very interesting new report authored by Marta Nelson, Samuel Feineh and Maris Mapolski of the Vera Institute of Justice. I had the good fortune to see an early draft of this provocative document, and I hope it gets widely read and generates considerable discussion and debate. Here is a small portion of the lengthy report’s executive summary:

This report posits that maintaining our system of mass incarceration will not bring people in the United States the safety and justice they deserve, while dismantling it in favor of a narrowly tailored sentencing response to unlawful behavior can produce more safety, repair harm, and reduce incarceration by close to 80 percent, according to modeling on the federal system.  In this report, the Vera Institute of Justice (Vera) addresses a main driver of mass incarceration: our sentencing system, or what happens to people after they have gone through the criminal legal system and are convicted of a crime.  The report

› provides a review of the history of sentencing in this country;

› summarizes the research and evidence surrounding sentencing’s impact on individual and community safety;

› offers new guiding principles that legislators should consider in place of the current primary reliance on deterrence, retribution, and excessive use of incapacitation;

› outlines seven key sentencing reforms in line with these guiding principles;

› models the impact of these reforms on both public safety and mass incarceration; and

› suggests a “North Star” for sentencing policy with a legal presumption toward community-based sentences except in limited circumstances….

Our current sentencing system defaults to putting most people convicted of crimes behind bars.  In 2006 in the United States — the last year in which national sentencing data was gathered — 70 percent of people convicted of state felonies ended up in prison; in the federal system, 90 percent of people convicted in 2019 did….

This default to incarceration does not build safety.  A 2021 meta-analysis of 116 studies found that custodial sentences not only do not prevent reoffending, but they can also actually increase it.  Explanations include that stripping neighborhoods of so many vital residents, including parents and breadwinners, can destabilize neighborhoods, and that the brutality of U.S. prisons, as well as the lack of opportunities after release, can negatively affect people’s behavior toward others while incarcerated — and afterward.

So how do we significantly change course? As a starting place, we must move away from retribution, deterrence, heavy reliance on incapacitation, and rehabilitation as the cornerstones of sentencing theory, policy, and practice.  These justifications for sentencing have been in currency for more than 200 years but are seldom scrutinized.  It is time to do so.