A New Paradigm for Sentencing in the United States

By Marta Nelson, Samuel Feineh and Maris Mapolski

One hundred years from now, we may look back at the United States’s overreliance on punishment and its progeny—mass incarceration—with the kind of abhorrence that we now hold for internment camps for Japanese Americans and Jim Crow laws. Or, if we never curb our reliance on jails and prisons for public safety, we may be in the same place then as we are today….This report posits that maintaining our system of mass incarceration will not bring people in the United States the safety and justice they deserve, while dismantling it in favor of a narrowly tailored sentencing response to unlawful behavior can produce more safety, repair harm, and reduce incarceration by close to 80 percent, according to modeling on the federal system. In this report, the Vera Institute of Justice (Vera) addresses a main driver of mass incarceration: our sentencing system, or what happens to people after they have gone through the criminal legal system and are convicted of a crime

New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2023. 81p.