The Failed Promise of Sentencing Reform

Despite 15 years of reform efforts, the incarceration rate in the United States remains unprecedentedly high. This book provides the first comprehensive survey of these reforms and explains why they have proven to be ineffective.

After many decades of stability, the imprisonment rate in the United States quintupled between 1973 and 2003. Since then, nearly all states have adopted multiple reforms intended to reduce imprisonment, but the U.S. imprisonment rate has only decreased by a paltry 2...