The Landscape of American Sentencing - Essay Example

Jail populations added approximately 129,189 inmates so that the U.S. confinement total included about 325,618 persons. In the next quarter-century, American prisons more than quintupled in size, reaching a one-day population of 1,182,169 by the end of 1996. As of June 30, 1996, jails across the country grew to hold an estimated 518,492 persons. In midyear 1996, the total adult incarcerated population was 1,630,940 inmates. Taking the nation's population growth into account, the U.S. incarceration rate had risen by a factor of 3.75, from 160 inmates per 100,000 general population in 1970 to 600 per 100,000 in 1995.

This expansion was not planned in advance, and, even with the benefit of hindsight, its causes are not well understood. Deliberate or not, explicable or not, the upswing in the use of confinement appears to be ongoing. American prisons and jails were growing at a rate of 189 new inmates per day between mid-1995 and mid-1996. While theories of pendulum swings might foretell an eventual reversal of the incarceration explosion, so far there is little evidence of such a shift in the national statistics.

Alongside the trend of escalation of confinement, there has been widespread experimentation across the country with new institutions and systems for the apportionment of criminal punishment. Rehabilitation, once the guiding theoretical light of American sentencing structures, has fallen by the wayside in the past two and a half decades, leaving policymakers scrambling for an alternative blueprint. Further, as criminal punishment has grown into an ever-more-sizable enterprise, governments have become increasingly interested in managerial tools for controlling systemic throughputs and outputs.

Many jurisdictions have created sentencing commissions, some have abolished parole boards, all have enacted mandatory penalty statutes for selected crimes, and a growing number have adopted sentencing guidelines (Tonry, 2000). Sentencing has been radically refashioned in two ways.