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Debate persists as to the amount of influence criminal history should have in determining the severity of imposed legal sanction for a criminal offense. One position maintains that the punishment for repeat and first-time offenders convicted for the same type of offense should be similar, whereas an alternative viewpoint argues that the state should sanction repeat offenders more harshly. We contribute to this discourse by investigating whether the amount of weight given to an offender's prior criminal record in sentencing affects the likelihood of repeat offending. Although initial findings showed that a substantive negative bivariate relationship existed at the county level between the weight-accorded prior criminal record in sentencing and repeat offending, this association disappeared in a more sophisticated nonlinear multilevel analysis. Our findings suggest that sanctioning repeat offenders more harshly than first-time offenders for similar offenses has little effect on attenuating repeat offending once other factors are controlled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

Although available empirical evidence suggests that Minnesota's Determinate Sentencing Law has had little effect on prison incarceration, it is still uncertain whether the sentencing guidelines affected jail use. A few recent studies imply that the guidelines have had a positive effect on jail incarceration rates. Accounts have pointed to preexisting trends, more severe sanctioning of repeat property offenders, and judicial concern with prison overcrowding as possible underlying causes of this observed increase. Using longitudinal data and an ARIMA study design, we investigate the validity of these competing explanations. Our findings show that the onset of the sentencing guidelines increased judicial use of the jail sanction beyond the effect of preexisting trends. In addition, the effect of mitigated dispositional departures from the no prison/prison outcome on jail use is salient only when prison population levels are high. This latter finding supports the thesis that judicial concern with prison overcrowding motivated judges to circumvent the guidelines in order to shift the burden of incarcerating offenders from the state to the local level The policy implications of these results for determinate sentencing reform are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]