How Do We Reduce Incarceration Rates While Maintaining Public Safety?

The heavy reliance on incarceration in the United States is unusual relative to U.S. history and relative to the use of incarceration in other nations. By now, the facts are common knowledge. We incarcerate our citizens at a rate that exceeds every other nation and that is multiple times (on the order of five to seven) the rates of other high-income countries. Moreover, since the mid-1970s, our incarceration rate has more than quadrupled. Several recent comprehensive studies of the rise of mass incarceration have concluded that nearly all of the growth in U.S. incarceration rates over recent decades can be attributed to changes in sentencing policy that have resulted in a higher propensity to apply prison as punishment and longer effective prison sentences (Raphael and Stoll, 2013; Travis and Western, 2014). Tonry (2014, this issue) offers a road map for the sentencing reforms that states and the federal government must pursue in some combination to affect substantial declines in the U.S. incarceration rate. The overall proposal is to the point, frank, and enumerates the sentencing practices specifically that drive mass incarceration. In terms of general principles, Tonry argues for a greater degree of proportionality between offense severity and sentence length, the greater individualization of sentencing, and a more systematic approach to sentencing that incorporates capacity constraints and social scientific knowledge on the determinants of offending and reoffending. Tonry’s (2014) proposal calls for the elimination or moderation of sentencing practices that tend to create long sentences for repeat and serious offenders, for example, three-strikes laws, truth-in-sentencing restrictions, life-without-parole sentences, and various mandatory minimums that govern sentencing at the state and federal levels. Such changes in conjunction with the establishment of sentencing commissions shielded from political influence would