Rapid Changes in Sentencing Structure

Rapid Changes in Sentencing Structure

Jennifer Spare

November 1, 2012

Columbia College

CJAD 350

For almost 45 years, judges serving in courts across the United States sentenced offenders to what is known as indeterminate sentencing. Indeterminate sentencing is when a judge sentences an offender to a minimum and a maximum amount of time they are to serve in prison. The offender will do no less than the minimum, but must be released when they have served their maximum sentence. For example, if an offender is sentenced to three to five years, they must serve at least three years, but are required to be released after serving five.

The goal of this sentencing style was to make the offender earn their release by doing well in prison. Their release was dependent upon their behavior and actions in prison, and whether or not they were deemed rehabilitated. Their release date was determined by a review by the parole board, which it was believed could sense that an offender had changed while incarcerated, and would be released.

But in the mid 1970’s, major changes to sentencing guidelines began to take place. Criticism arose, not only expressing that that indeterminate sentencing was ‘inequitable and ineffective and both too harsh and too lenient,’ but that it was also ‘impossible to determine a “correct” or “fair” sentence for a type of crime’ (Overview of Sentencing Reforms and Practices, 2000). California and Maine were the first states to discard the main points on indeterminate sentencing and to have the belief that parole should be accessible to almost all prisoners (Tonry, 1999). The causes of these changes spanned from the prisoners themselves, all the way to the political arena.

Prisoners showed just how infuriated prisoners were with not only the concept of rehabilitation, but also with their living conditions. These issues were brought to the forefront by many prison riots, most notably at Attica. On September 13, 1971, prisoners...