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Sentencing Guidelines: Where We Are And How We Got Here (Panel Remarks), Frank O. Bowman Iii

Faculty Publications

The Federal Sentencing Guidelines were created with two broad goals in mind. One, of course, was to reduce unjustified sentencing disparity, and that was accomplished in two ways. The first was to reduce the scope of front-end judicial discretion through the creation of guidelines. The second, which I think Tom Hutchison touched on,1 was to eliminate altogether the discretion of penological experts in the parole commission at the back end of the punishment process.