Shifting Views of the Sentencing Function

Abstract

continued concern over the high incidence of crime in America, coupled with increasing evidence that numerous favored programs have failed to meet expectations, have combined to focus greater attention on the function of the sentence in the overall response to criminal behavior. Declining confidence in the rehabilitative model has shifted the functional appraisal of sentencing from assessment of its ability to steer persons into appropriate treatment programs to an assessment of its ability to serve alternative goals of deterrence, incapacitation, and retribution. It appears, however, that limitations on empirical assessment of effectiveness will lead to the same kinds of skepticism that have undermined the rehabilitative model. The net result will probably be modest adjustment in the relative emphasis on competing functions rather than exclusive or even predominant adherence to a single function.

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References

1. Robert O. Dawson , Sentencing: The Decision as to Type, Length and Conditions of Sentence (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969), p. 3.

American Law Institute , Model Penal Code, Proposed Official Draft (1962), Sect. 1.02(1).

3. Andrew von Hirsch , Doing Justice The Choice of Punishments (New York: Hill & Wang, 1976).

4. Ibid., p. 47.

5. Francis A. Allen , The Borderland of Criminal Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), p. 126.

6. Ibid., pp. 12-16.

7. Lee Sechrest , Susan O. White , and Elizabeth D. Brown , eds. The Rehabilitation of Criminal Offenders: Problems and Prospects (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1979).

8. Douglas Lipton , Robert Martinson , and Judith Wilks , Effectiveness of Correctional Treatment: A Survey of Treatment Evaluation Studies (New York: Praeger, 1975).

9. Von Hirsch , Doing Justice, p. 51.

10.

10. Peter B. Hoffman , Barbara Stone-Meierhoefer , and James L. Beck , “Salient Factor Score and Release Behavior: Three Validation Samples,” Law and Human Behavior, 2:47, table 4 (1978).

11.

11. James B. Eaglin and Patricia A. Lombard , A Validation and Comparative Evaluation of Four Predictive Devices for Classifying Federal Probation Caseloads (Washington, DC: Federal Judicial Center, 1982), table 36.

12.

12. John C. Coffee, Jr. , “Repressed Issues of Sentencing: Accountability, Predictability, and Equality in the Era of the Sentencing Commission,” Georgetown Law Journal, 66:975, 993 (Apr. 1978).

13.

13. Von Hirsch , Doing Justice, p. 26.

14.

14. Note composition of the Committee for the Study of Incarceration , which issued Doing Justice.

15.

15. See separate view of committee member Joseph Goldstein in Doing Justice, pp. 171-174.