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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.

Using an interrupted time-series design, this research note analyzes the long-term effect of Minnesota's sentencing guidelines on reducing unwarranted disparity in sentencing outcomes that fall within their scope of authority. Unwarranted disparity is defined as residual variation not attributable to legally mandated sentencing factors. Findings suggest that although the sentencing guidelines initially reduced disparity for the no prison/prison sentencing decision, inequality began to revert to preguideline levels as time passed. Further analysis revealed that the guidelines had a permanent impact on reducing disparities in decisions on the length of prison sentence. Overall we observed an 18% decline in disparity for the no prison/prison outcome and a 60% reduction in inequality for the judicial decision as to length of prison sentence, Two explanations for the reversionary trend in the no prison/ prison series are highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]