1. THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF LINKING SENTENCING GUIDELINES TO PRISON POPULATIONS--A REPLY TO MOODY AND MARVELL.
- Author
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Stolzenberg, Lisa and D'Alessio, Stewart J.
- Subjects
- *
CRIMINAL sentencing , *CRIMINAL procedure , *DETENTION of persons , *PRISON sentences , *IMPRISONMENT - Abstract
The article presents a response to a comment on the article The Impact of Sentencing Guidelines on Jail Incarceration in Minnesota which applied an autoregressive integrated moving average analysis to estimate the impact of Minnesota's sentencing guidelines effective in May 1980, on the number of convicted felons sentenced to jail. The analyses on the article are flawed and the procedures they advance for handling imbedded missing data in the dependent series are neither supported in the literature nor logically sufficient, valuable lessons can be drawn from the exchange. Linking determinate sentencing reform to prison populations can have unintended consequences. Specifically, determinate sentencing reforms that place limits only on the growth of prison populations may result in substantial increases in jail use and thereby may erode policymakers' efforts to produce desirable long-term effects on overall incarcerated populations. Further, the organizational imperative to maintain the prison population at an acceptable level may supplant the more distant, more abstract goal of equity in criminal sentencing. Broad sentencing reform efforts that include constraints on jail use are warranted.
- Published
- 1996
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