Structured Sentencing

Research Paper – Structured Sentencing Promising to get tough on crime has become popular with politicians and much of the public. But in the late 1980s North Carolina came to realize that the promise can carry a high price, resulting in expensive prison-building programs, diminished space for violent offenders, a mismatch between sentences and actual time served, violations of federal decrees on prison overcrowding, and ultimately, a broad failure of public confidence in the judicial and …

…years. However, individual counties may experience some jail overcrowding depending on local pretrial and sentencing practices. North Carolina’s system today is turning around. Not all the problems have disappeared, and new ones keep emerging. But the reliance on guidelines to structure decisions about the use and duration of confinement has created a more promising future for criminal justice in the state. Structured sentencing has proven to be a very efficient system of criminal justice.