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Sense And Sentencing: Our Imprisonment Epidemic, Michael A. Simons

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

Over the past thirty years, the most important sentencing development has not been the legislative adoption of mandatory guidelines, or the judicial creation of advisory guidelines, or the adoption of a wide variety of guidelines systems in the states, or the widespread elimination of parole, or the abandonment of rehabilitation as a sentencing goal. No, the most important sentencing development has been our rejection of the principal of parsimony: the notion that a sentence should be as long as - but no longer than - necessary to accomplish the goals of punishment. Instead, we have replaced parsimony with severity, …