Danger and Opportunity: Making Public Safety Job One in Pennsylvania's Indeterminate Sentencing System

Abstract

Pennsylvania's prison population increased annually between 2000 and 2007 by an average of 3.2%. However, between 2007 and 2008, the change was 9.1%, the highest in the nation and well above the national average of 0.8%. In 2008, the Pennsylvania General Assembly authorized $800 million for the construction of four new state correctional facilities; nonetheless, the Department of Corrections has contracted with county facilities to house about 500 state prisoners, and with other jurisdictions to transfer 2,000 inmates to facilities out of state. Both overcrowded facilities and reactionary policies to reduce overcrowding can have negative impacts on public safety. In an indeterminate sentencing system, efforts to maintain public safety within the constraints of correctional resources requires fundamental changes in sentencing practices and improved coordination with parole decision making. In the fall of 2008, the Pennsylvania General Assembly enacted a comprehensive package of sentencing and corrections reform legislation, which added to the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing's existing duties the responsibilities of developing parole guidelines. The establishment of integrated guidelines, for consideration at sentencing and at parole, represents a major departure from the guideline practices of the last three decades in Pennsylvania. It requires a careful consideration of the role of retribution and prediction in the development of guidelines, the use of actuarial data to forecast future offending patterns, and the study of outcomes to determine the efficacy of sentencing and parole programs and practices. However, as has been demonstrated convincingly in other jurisdictions, when done correctly, public safety can be enhanced and correctional costs contained through a more thoughtful and coordinated use of these evidence-based approaches.

Possibilities and Contestation in Twenty-First-Century US Criminal Justice Downsizing

“…Perhaps more saliently, a spike in crime-particularly violent crime committed by parolees-could reverse reforms by providing new opportunities for actors supporting tough punishment (Weisberg & Petersilia 2010). Indeed, violent crime by parolees halted reform efforts recently in Michigan (Rengifo et al 2010), Pennsylvania (Bergstrom & Mistick 2010), and Illinois (Eaglin 2013)-and antireform actors in California continue to agitate that realignment and Proposition 47 will increase crime (Aviram 2016). A similar battle has been waged over the "Ferguson effect," or charges that the protests associated with the Black Lives Matter movement have increased violent crime rates (e.g., Friedman et al 2015, Mac Donald 2015.…”

Brandeis's Laboratories of Sentencing and Corrections: Making Better Use of Knowledge from the States

“…As Mark Bergstrom and his coauthor Joseph Mistick recognize, an insurance model of sentencing presents a major challenge to desert theory, or-operationally-to the goals of sentencing "uniformity" and "proportionality." The Pennsylvania sentencing guidelines, and other early guidelines systems, were based heavily on concepts of desert (Bergstrom & Mistick, 2010;see von Hirsch, Knapp, & Tonry, 1987). Since then, however, utilitarian objectives have been reasserting themselves as legitimate components of guidelines systems (see Frase, 2005;Kern, 1995).…”