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.