DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE

OFF ICE OF JUSTICE PROGRAMS

BJA NI J OJJDP BJS OVC

Reforming Sentencing and

Corrections for Just Punishment

and Public Safety

by Michael E. Smith and Walter J. Dickey 

S

entencing courts and corrections agencies are not communicating about what

matters. When imposing sentence, a

judge rarely states clearly the purpose of the

sentence or the process by which corrections

is expected to achieve it. When correctional

agencies are left guessing, they revert to routine administration of the generic penal measures (prison, probation, and parole) and let

offenders under supervision in the community

decide who will earn revocation.

If courts and correction are to work in harmony (which our collective interest in justice

and public safety requires they do), more

than incremental investments in generic penal

measures are needed. Major restructuring is

called for—restructuring of penal and corrections law, and restructuring of correctional

strategies and penal measures.1

Imaginative sentencing judges and innovative

community corrections professionals have the

practical knowledge necessary to begin that

restructuring. The transformation will not be

easy, as it requires a fresh look at what public

safety is and how correctional agencies can

contribute to it. It also requires disciplined

fact finding and reasoning by sentencing

courts—an application of the rule of law

familiar in every area of the law but this one.2

■ ■ ■

The nature of public safety

revisited

I

n the press and in political discourse, 

“public safety” usually means more arrests,

more illicit drugs seized, more sentences to

incarceration, and fewer reported crimes.

These definitions have achieved currency

because publicly accountable officials do

know how to arrest and imprison offenders,

have built a substantial capacity to do so, and

do know how to count crime complaints. 

But experience has taught us that rising numbers of arrests and prisoners are often indicators of the absence of public safety. Similarly,

a falling crime rate can be cause for alarm

when it means only that citizens despair of

Research in Brief

U.S. Department of Justice

Office of Justice Programs

National Institute of Justice

September 1999 Papers From the Executive Sessions on Sentencing and Corrections 

No. 4

SIssues for the 21st Century

ENTENCING & CORRECTION S S ENTENCING 

Issues for the 21st CenturyS

Directors’ Message

It is by now a commonplace that the number 

of people under criminal justice supervision 

in this country has reached a record high. As 

a result, the sentencing policies driving that

number, and the field of corrections, where 

the consequences are felt, have acquired an

unprecedented salience. It is a salience defined

more by issues of magnitude, complexity, and

expense than by any consensus about future

directions. 

Are sentencing policies, as implemented through

correctional programs and practices, achieving

their intended purposes? As expressed in the

movement to eliminate indeterminate sentencing and limit judicial discretion, on the one

hand, and to radically restructure our retributive system of justice, on the other, the purposes seem contradictory, rooted in conflicting

values. The lack of consensus on where sentencing and corrections should be headed is

thus no surprise. 

Because sentencing and corrections policies

have such major consequences—for the 

allocation of government resources and, more

fundamentally and profoundly, for the quality 

of justice in this country and the safety of its 

citizens—the National Institute of Justice and the

Corrections Program Office (CPO) of the Office

of Justice Programs felt it opportune to explore

them in depth. Through a series of Executive

Sessions on Sentencing and Corrections, begun

CONTINUED ...
reporting crimes or when fear of crime so

restricts their activities that they are afraid to

leave home. It makes no sense to find public

safety where the crime rate in an area has

fallen to zero, but where teenagers roam 

the parks in a vain search for robbery victims

who are home behind double-locked doors.

In other words, threats to public safety cannot

be measured by numbers of arrests and prisoners or by aggregate crime data. They are

local in nature, arising in specific places—

in that park, on this street corner, in this

house—and they often exist at certain times

and not others. 

These features make aggregate crime and 

justice statistics virtually useless as measures

of public safety and introduce a level of 

complexity to which publicly accountable 

government officials have an understandable

aversion. They can with some confidence

promise more arrests, prison cells, and

prison time for convicted offenders. They 

cannot with the same confidence claim to

understand what makes a certain street corner dangerous or, more to the point, what

might be done to make it safe. The agencies

of government know relatively little about how

to make neighborhoods, parks, bus shelters,

street corners, and bedrooms safe. Nor is

there a budgetary or bureaucratic reward for

doing so, in part because such things are not

measured. For those who administer conventional correctional agencies and for almost

everyone else concerned (except those at risk

of crime victimization), defining the public

safety problem as “too many offenders, not

enough cells” works better. 

What public safety is not

Public safety must be more than an increase

in the number of imprisoned offenders. It

cannot be the same as a lower crime rate—

an expression of aggregate data reflecting the

volume of complaints about a host of different

crimes committed in divergent communities

where the facts and circumstances affecting

public safety change and move in different

directions all the time. 

But if public safety were defined, as it should

be, by the degree to which people and property are free from the threat of harm in particular places and at particular times, publicly

accountable officials would face the daunting

prospect of creating the conditions of safety in

the many places and at the many times in

which they do not exist. We suggest that public safety is defined as it is today because

those officials as well as the body politic lack

confidence in government’s capacity to produce the real thing. 

What public safety is

It turns out to be too easy to say what public

safety is not. What is needed is a rudimentary

understanding of what it is: a condition, specific to places, in which people and property

are not at risk of attack or theft and are not

perceived to be at risk. Such places would

likely share the following characteristics: 

■ A set of generally agreed-upon rules of

behavior. 

■ A shared appreciation that rule-breaking

will be punished. 

■ A further appreciation that playing by the

rules will be rewarded. 

Viewed this way, creating and maintaining

public safety requires teaching the lessons of

responsibility and accountability and reinforcing them in raising children, supervising adolescents, and producing law-abiding young

adults. These are tasks for parents, neighbors,

schools, churches, athletic teams, community

service groups, the labor market, and—on

what needs to be relatively rare occasions—

a local police, probation, or parole officer.

This is not work that can safely be left to 

sentencing judges and correctional agencies.

It will require imposing penal measures on

convicted offenders but it cannot be achieved

by that means.

2 Sentencing & Corrections

in 1998 and continuing through the year 2000,

practitioners and scholars foremost in their

field, representing a broad cross-section of

points of view, are being brought together to

find out if there is a better way to think about

the purposes, functions, and interdependence

of sentencing and corrections policies. 

We are fortunate in having secured the assistance of Michael Tonry, Sonosky Professor 

of Law and Public Policy at the University of

Minnesota Law School, as project director. 

One product of the sessions is this series of

papers, commissioned by NIJ and the CPO as

the basis for the discussions. Drawing on the

research and experience of the session participants, the papers are intended to distill their

judgments about the strengths and weaknesses

of current practices and about the most promising ideas for future developments. 

The sessions were modeled on the executive

sessions on policing held in the 1980s and

1990s under the sponsorship of NIJ and

Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Those sessions played a role in conceptualizing

community policing and spreading it. Whether

the current sessions and the papers based on

them will be instrumental in developing a new

paradigm for sentencing and corrections, or

even whether they will generate broad-based

support for a particular model or strategy for

change, remains to be seen. It is our hope that

in the current environment of openness to new

ideas, the session papers will provoke comment, promote further discussion and, taken

together, will constitute a basic resource document on sentencing and corrections policy

issues that will prove useful to State and local

policymakers.

Jeremy Travis

Director

National Institute of Justice

U.S. Department of Justice 

Larry Meachum

Director

Corrections Program Office

U.S. Department of Justice

2 Sentencing & Corrections

Directors’ Message

CONTINUED ...
Sentencing & Corrections 3

The community policing 

example

This conception of public safety has animated

community policing. Instead of riding around

in a patrol car waiting for the chance to arrest

a bad guy, a police officer does more to create safety by finding ways to bring other adults

into a neighborhood’s public spaces, particularly at times when no officer is there. If a

conventionally deployed police officer is the

only active representative of adult authority 

on the street, there is no adult authority most

of the time. Police officers help to displace

citizens’ fear of crime with actions that prevent it, helping them organize to restore and

maintain a sense of mutual obligation in their

neighborhoods and seeking their help in

devising the most effective patrol deployment

plans.

From this concept of government’s role in

generating public safety flow powerful analogies for the roles of probation and parole

agents. They could be active in neighborhoods where public safety is threatened—

locating, invoking, and supporting informal

mechanisms of social control—to contain 

the risks posed by people who are under correctional supervision (and by those who are

not). This seems ambitious only because we

have grown accustomed to passive supervision—waiting to see which offenders will 

violate probation or parole—which is nicely

analogous to random motor patrol by the

police.

For correctional agencies to advance public

safety in carrying out sentences, and for

judges to take proper account of public 

safety when imposing them, restructuring 

the sentencing process is required, along 

with revising the deployment of corrections

resources. In the first section below, we propose a restructuring of sentencing based on

rule-of-law principles. We demonstrate that

these principles require a judge to base a

sentence on findings of fact about the specific

risks an individual offender poses to public

safety, the particular places where that offender is likely to be found, and the relative plausibility of penal measures available to reduce

those risks. In subsequent sections we show

how, if courts are to impose sentences in

accord with rule-of-law principles, the management of correctional agencies—and 

especially community corrections—must 

also change.

■ ■ ■

Sentencing under the rule 

of law

The plausibility of any penal measure (curfew, jail, or drug treatment, for example)

as a means to advance a penal strategy (incapacitation, deterrence, or rehabilitation, for

example) varies with an individual offender’s

characteristics and circumstances. It at first

appears difficult to accommodate this fact,

and the individualized sentences it seems to

require, within the current normative environment, which values equality, proportionality, and accountability. Each of these values

ought to inform, but inevitably complicates, 

a court’s case-by-case assessment of the plausibility of particular penal measures.

If the value of equality requires that “like

cases be treated alike,” and if, as is commonly assumed, gravity of offense and prior

record are the only facts relevant to the 

“likeness” of cases, then a proposal to tailor

sentences to any other characteristics of

offenders and the circumstances of the offenses would be an affront to equality. But prior

record and gravity of offense, although relevant at sentencing, are hardly sufficient to

define a category of offenders who are “alike”

in culpability or in the threat they pose to

public safety. Similarly, “like treatment” ought

not mean “the same sentence.” Norval Morris

put it best:

The task [is] to reduce disparity in sentencing, not to achieve equality—and

by disparity in sentencing I mean the

imposition of sentences randomly or

deliberately outside a range agreed,

expressly or implicitly, to be justly

deserved and socially necessary punishments. . . . [As] desert is a limiting

principle of punishment, and not a

defining principle, desert will allow for

the differential treatment of morally

like cases.3

Adding to the complexity are tensions among

plausibility of penal purpose, equality of penal

burden, and accountability in complying with

obligations imposed by the sentence. These

tensions are most evident when a court

imposes a noncustodial sentence or when 

the conditions of parole or other postconfinement supervision are set. They arise because:

■ Different noncustodial penal measures

serve different purposes. 

■ Noncustodial penal measures serving 

the public safety purpose do so by varied

strategies. 

■ Every sentencing condition increases the

risk of nonperformance by the offender. 

■ Nonperformance of a sentence condition

damages either the offenders (if they are 

punished for violating the condition) or

accountability (if they are not punished), 

and in either case poses a risk to public safety

(if the condition was reasonably required for

public safety). 

To help guide the courts in selecting penal

purpose, penal strategies, and penal measures that fit the facts as they vary from case 

to case, three principles can be advanced:

specificity, clarity, and parsimony.4

Specificity. Is the purpose public safety or

just deserts? Specifying the purpose of each

sentence element is essential to its effective

implementation. For example, a 7 p.m. 

curfew may be a condition of probation or

parole. The enforcement of this condition 

and the consequences of violating it ought 

Sentencing & Corrections 3
to be shaped by the answer to the question,

“Was the curfew imposed because the restriction on the offender’s liberty is deserved punishment or because his unsupervised liberty

after 7 p.m. puts citizens or their property 

at risk?” 

Even more important is specificity about

penal strategy. An example is the sentencing

of persistent petty thieves. In a court where a

prison sentence of a year, for example, is routine for such cases, the year will be imposed

in one case by a judge who believes it will 

dissuade other thieves, in a second case by a

judge who hopes it will dissuade this particular thief, in a third case by a judge who is

concerned only with punishing theft because

theft is bad, and in a fourth case by a judge

who is content to put a dent in thievery by

incapacitating for a year someone known to

have committed theft on a regular basis. It is

unlikely that the choices of these judges are

equally plausible in each petty theft case in

which the 1-year sentences are imposed. 

This 1-year custodial sentence probably cannot serve both penal purposes and all penal

strategies in every case. But we believe no

noncustodial sentence could do so. That is

because of the many combinations of characteristics and circumstances thieves bring to

sentencing. For example, a generic noncustodial sentence that aims to end a thief’s thievery by incapacitation, by deterrence, and by

rehabilitation too would become unjustly 

burdensome and excessively costly in every

case in which it was imposed. Ensuring the

rehabilitation of homeless, addicted, persistent petty thieves would strain the purse and

patience of anyone attempting it, as would

ensuring their incapacitation in the community until the risk they will commit more thefts

has passed. If deserved punishment is a 

constraint—if it is immoral to impose more 

punishment than an offender deserves—the

accumulating penal burdens of this sentence,

though noncustodial, would have to end long

before its strategic objective were achieved.

Thus, it would be wise to specify deserved

punishment as the purpose of sentencing

petty thieves who possess these characteristics, as that purpose can be achieved within

the constraint of just deserts.

Current law does not require resolving conflicts between just desert and public safety as

the proper or plausible purpose of a sentence

for persistent petty theft or, for that matter, for

any other crime. Nor does it require that a

court assess the relative

plausibility of the quite 

different penal strategies by

which theft sentences, for

example, might advance

the public’s interest in

reducing thievery. But

resolving the conflicts of

purpose and selecting plausible strategies are

not possible unless sentencing courts apply

the principle of specificity. 

Clarity. Clarity about penal purpose and strategy might seem to matter little when confinement to prison is the only penal measure

about which we are concerned. But clarity

about purpose permits reasoned resolution 

of conflicts between just desert and public

safety, and lack of clarity about penal strategy

aborts inquiry into the relative plausibility of

each penal measure available to the court.

This is because courts must select from an

array or continuum of penal sanctions, each

of which serves some but not all purposes.

For example: 

■ Community service, a form of involuntary

servitude, can serve retributive and deterrent

purposes but is not well designed to incapacitate or rehabilitate.

■ Compulsory drug treatment can have punitive weight and rehabilitative value, depending

on the offender and the regimen but, depending on the regimen, might or might not have

incapacitative value.

■ Electronically monitored house arrest can

be used for deterrence and retribution but is

most plausibly connected to the public safety

purpose by its partially incapacitating effects.

Absent clarity by the sentencing court about

the penal purpose of a sentence and its strategic relationship to public safety, correctional

agents who carry out the sentence must simply guess what to do. This makes it less likely

that cases seen as “alike” by the court will

receive like treatment—indeed, less likely

that the penal strategy the court had in mind

will be pursued, and less likely that either

purpose (public safety, deserved punishment)

will be achieved.

Parsimony. There is a major pitfall for those

who construct, advocate, or carry out noncustodial sentences. By promising to accomplish

more than would be required if the court’s

purposes were clear and if the court specified

the penal strategy by which it expects to

advance public safety in a particular case,

they risk accomplishing nothing. The danger

of this happening is most evident when a

defense attorney or sentence planner, attempting to improve the odds that a judge will

impose a noncustodial sentence, recommends adding multiple conditions, justifying

them by reference to every permissible sentencing purpose and strategy without regard

to the plausibility of each element of the sentence or to the offender’s ability to comply. 

If the court placed on record its purpose 

and strategies, the reasons a purpose urged

by an advocate is not desirable or achievable,

and the reasons a proposed strategy or penal

measure is implausible or excessive in the

4 Sentencing & Corrections 4 Sentencing & Corrections

absent clarity by the court about the

penal purpose of a sentence and its relationship to public safety, correctional

agents who carry out the sentence must

simply guess what to do.
Sentencing & Corrections 5

particular case, there would be benefits

beyond the case. Such documentation is 

necessary because excess in selecting penal

strategies and in imposing sentence conditions sets offenders up for failure, whether 

or not public safety is advanced thereby.

Conversely, parsimony in selecting penal

strategies and penal measures helps preserve

accountability while making it more likely that

the court’s penal purposes will be achieved. 

What does the rule of law

require at sentencing? 

It has been more than a quarter of a century

since Judge Marvin Frankel’s indictment of

unfettered sentencing discretion precipitated

the continuing search for ways to bring sentencing decisions within the rule of law.5

Almost as strong as Judge Frankel’s passion

for the rule of law was his doubt that judges

or legislators would resolve either the 

“questions of justification and purpose” that

surround imposition of penal measures or 

the questions about their efficacy that plague 

their execution. But the movement toward

presumptive sentencing guidelines that his

book inspired was not inevitable. Although 

he called for “a detailed chart or calculus to

be used by the sentencing judge in weighing

the many elements that go into the sentence,”

he also wrote of the need to apply to sentencing decisions the factfinding and reasoning

processes on which the rule of law ordinarily

relies when complexity and competing interests require the exercise of discretion. 

Judges and others tend to view the numbers

arrayed in guideline grids as end points of a

decisionmaking process rather than as starting points. Is the rule of law observed when

two facts suffice to locate an offender in a

grid of prescribed sentences? We think not.

The rule of law requires that a court first

determine what facts are relevant in light of

the purpose for which a penal sanction is

being imposed and then, by inference from

those facts, reason to the type and amount 

of penal measure. 

Such application of the rule of law would

specify how, at the trial court, the purpose 

of the sentence in a particular case is to be

determined, and how the facts relevant to

choosing the type and amount of sanction 

are to be distinguished from facts that are

irrelevant. Such application would specify the

process by which the relevant facts are to be

found and how strong the inferences drawn

from them must be for a sentence based on

them to be lawful. The rule of law would set

the standard of review applicable when this

factfinding or reasoning is alleged not to satisfy these requirements. While promulgation

and enforcement of rules—even the rules

embedded in guideline grids—is “law” of a

kind, the “rule of law” is something more.

What has been lost by using presumptive

guidelines? Presumptive guideline grids

have sometimes altered sentencing practices

and the distribution of punishments, have

reduced the appearance of sentencing disparity (as conventionally defined), have in some

jurisdictions made prison population projections more reliable and (at least theoretically)

more sensitive to resource constraints, and

have in a few jurisdictions generated a body

of useful appellate case law. Nevertheless, we

think the decisional rules embedded in most

of them fall short of rule-of-law requirements. 

Using presumptive guideline grids to structure

sentencing exaggerates the importance of 

current offense and prior record—facts

made relevant, to the near exclusion of others, by their placement along the two axes 

of the grids. Rule-of-law sentencing would

structure the factfinding by which a sentencing court determines which circumstances 

of the case are relevant, and the reasoning by

which it selects the penal strategy (e.g., deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation) and the

particular penal measures that most plausibly

advance public safety in light of those facts.

The rule of law requires that, for any sentence, the strategy linking penal purpose to

the penal measures imposed be at least plausible—maybe “more plausible than the available alternatives.” This requirement calls in

turn for factfinding and reasonable inferences

about how well the penal strategy and penal

measures employed suit the facts of the particular case and offender. 

Perhaps the core deficiency of presumptive

guidelines is that they encourage judges to

avoid this underlying complexity. In examining this complexity, we use noncustodial

penal measures for illustration, because in

most jurisdictions a sentence to prison is

imposed in only about half of all felony cases

(and is, even in those cases, almost always

followed by a period of noncustodial supervision) and because any effort to bring consistency and reason to the use of noncustodial

measures immediately brings the complexity

to the surface. 

Noncustodial penal measures are of many

types, can be combined in almost infinite variation, and cannot be reduced to “duration”

or another single measure of penal burden.

Extending the reach of guideline grid systems

to encompass such sentences has proved difficult and may have reached a dead end. This

is because noncustodial penal measures cannot serve the purposes for which they are

imposed unless they are tailored to the varied

nonlinear characteristics and circumstances

of individual offenders. The challenge is to

determine how “tailoring” sanctions can be

governed by the rule of law and not left to the

unfettered (and perhaps biased) discretion of

judges. If that challenge could be met, there

would be no reason not to rely on those principles and procedures in imposing custodial

sentences as well. 

What is gained by reasoning from penal

purpose to sentence by inference from

facts and circumstances in each case?

At the most general level, the rule of law by

which sentences should be imposed may be

stated as follows: 

Decisions about the types and amount

of penal measures to impose should be

Sentencing & Corrections 5
reached, at a specified degree of confidence, through a publicly explained

and reviewable application of a legal

standard, to facts found to a specified

degree of subjective certainty by fair

inference from reliable evidence—

with the specifications, the legal standard, and the burden of persuasion

established by lawful authority other

than the decisionmaker. 

This statement is admittedly abstract, but it is

not unknown in criminal court, where a guilty

verdict is lawful only if the factfinder is confident beyond a reasonable doubt, in light of 

all relevant evidence, that the facts required

by statutory definition of the crime have been

proved. 

It would be paralyzing to require a court to

find beyond a reasonable doubt that the sentence imposed in a given case will advance its

specified penal purpose, but the rule of law

requires this level of confidence only for decisions about guilt. A burden of persuasion better suited to the sentencing decision might be

that the sentence imposed is “more likely to

advance the penal purpose than alternatives

available to the court.” But rule-of-law principles are slighted if there is no burden of persuasion on this question; that is, if it were

lawful for a court to impose a sentence it

believes, on the basis of known evidence, is

not likely to advance the penal purpose. This

is far too often the case today, most obviously

when an addicted offender is sentenced to

prison for drug treatment even though the

court has good reason to doubt that a treatment slot will be available.

It would indeed be possible to ground 

sentencing decisions in the kind of factual

inquiry that criminal courts are designed to

conduct. That could happen if courts’ sentencing power were exercised with caseby-case attention to the plausibility of the sentence as a means to achieve just punishment

and public safety, and if care were taken to

invoke only penal measures that are actually

available. This type of factual inquiry would

assign prosecution and defense a function for

which they are (or should be) well prepared.

In addition, factfinding of this kind is especially suitable to appellate or other review. 

On review, the sufficiency of evidence on

which a sentencing court makes its findings 

of fact, and the strength of the inferences

drawn from them that lead it to the sentence

imposed, can be tested against a prescribed

legal standard.

How would rule-of-law 

sentencing work? 

To ease the task of illustrating how the rule 

of law could be applied to sentencing, and

why it would be worth applying, we assume 

a jurisdiction in which public safety and just

punishment are by statute the only permissible purposes of sentences. On the basis of

these assumptions, rule-of-law sentencing

might be structured this way:

1. When imposing sentence—

(a) the court shall specify the following: the

primary purpose (just desert or public

safety), the facts relevant to its finding 

of desert, the penal strategy or strategies

by which it finds public safety would be

advanced by its sentence, the penal

measures by which it expects the sentence to serve that strategy, the facts

upon which it finds the sentence more

likely to advance the purposes of desert

and public safety than alternatives known

to it, and the facts justifying any exchange

of desert for public safety;

(b) the court shall consider public safety the

primary penal purpose, although just

desert should be an element of and a

constraint upon every sentence; 

(c) public safety trumps desert when the

court finds the magnitude of deserved

punishment would interfere with the

most plausible penal strategy for advancing public safety; but 

(d) just desert is the only permissible purpose when the court finds no strategy

plausible for advancing public safety

through imposition of any penal measures authorized for the offense. 

2. The court shall impose the sentence it finds

more likely to advance the specified penal

purpose(s) than the alternatives. 

This procedure may appear burdensome if

weighed against the requirements of sentencing hearings in indeterminate sentencing

systems today, or even in the most exacting

presumptive guideline systems. However, the

law in this country requires this sort of rigorous factfinding as a matter of course in other

fields, where often much less is at stake.

Moreover, although some facts will vary greatly from offender to offender, many will not,

thus limiting the factfinding burden. 

The procedure should be guided by a new

style of sentencing commission, one that

reviews evidence bearing on commonly arising questions of fact, further narrowing the

original factfinding required in individual

cases. Such a commission could, for example,

make findings about the circumstances in

which one penal strategy might generally be

preferred over another for particular types of

cases or for a particular purpose (for example, deterrence over incapacitation or rehabilitation over incapacitation for public safety;

prison over fine or community service over

prison for just punishment). 

Similarly, a new style of sentencing commission could guide sentencing courts in making

findings about the punishment a particular

offender deserves. Just desert is notoriously

difficult to “find.” It cannot properly be specified by a legislature or commission that is

unfamiliar with the case-specific facts and circumstances bearing on an offender’s culpability, but we should be concerned that, without

guidance, sentencing judges will “find” just

desert by personal and essentially unreviewable hunch. A court’s findings about the range

6 Sentencing & Corrections 6 Sentencing & Corrections
Sentencing & Corrections 7

of just punishment in a particular case should

be tied to norms and values widely shared in

the body politic, not to those of judges, legislators, or the media. The sentencing commission envisioned here would undertake systematic inquiry of the general population, to

find the range of punishments widely thought

to be deserved in archetypal offense/offender

scenarios and to discover how the public’s

view is affected by knowing that particular

penal measures tied to the public safety purpose are available to the sentencing court. 

On the basis of such inquiries, ranges of “not

undeserved” punishments could be provided

to the courts as starting points from which 

to reason to sentences. 

What would rule-of-law 

sentencing orders look like? 

The rule of law would require that sentencing

orders link a limited set of conditions imposed on an offender to the lawful purpose 

or purposes specified. Multiple-conditioned,

all-purpose sentences undermine the development of operational capacity in community

correctional agencies. Correctional agents

flounder when they try to deliver everything to

a court that did not make clear what it wanted

or how it expected the penal measures

imposed to produce the intended effect. Such

sentences also undermine accountability

because violations of nonessential conditions

often either go unpunished or are punished

without good reason. They undermine cost

effectiveness because staff who supervise an

offender burdened with such a sentence

either must waste resources on interventions

and enforcement not tied to a penal purpose

or not based on a plausible strategy, or they

must guess which, if any, conditions of the 

sentence should be treated seriously.

Sentences to community service, drug or

alcohol treatment, home detention, and other

noncustodial penal measures serve sentencing purposes of desert or public safety (or, 

in some cases, both) through plausible penal

strategies. But this is true only if the sentence

is imposed in cases in which the purpose 

and the strategy are congruent with the penal

measures. For example, when community

service sentences are imposed on individuals

whose liberty poses immediate unacceptable

threats to public safety, those sentences may

indeed punish but will before long come into

disrepute for their failure to incapacitate.

When home confinement, curfews, and other

surveillance techniques are imposed too

widely on offenders whose unsupervised

behavior is not viewed as particularly risky

but whose offenses deserve to be punished,

the conditions are not likely to be rigorously

enforced. Again, the noncustodial penal

measure is likely to fall into disrepute for its

apparent inability to accomplish the penal

purpose that would justify its imposition.

A rule-of-law sentencing order would reflect

the principle of parsimony—parsimony in 

the number of penal strategies and measures. 

It would also reflect consideration of public

safety risks that require management while

the sentence is carried out. When a noncustodial penal measure is imposed or a prison

sentence reaches its postconfinement phase,

the offender’s conditioned liberty may or may

not put victim, family, or community at risk 

of harm. An essential task for sentencing

courts (and for correctional staff responsible

for implementing noncustodial sentences and

the noncustodial phases of prison sentences)

is to specify the risks the sentence is intended

to contain. They should ask how serious the

potential harm is, how likely the offender is 

to cause harm in the absence of penal intervention, and how perfectly the correctional

intervention must contain the harm.

The answers can be found only by inference

properly drawn from the individual characteristics and circumstances of an offender the

circumstances surrounding his or her conditioned liberty, the purposes of the sentencing

court, the penal strategy the court adopted,

and the correctional resources available to

manage the risk. When public safety is a dominant purpose, it is hard to imagine findings

more important for the sentencing court to

make—or findings more useful to correctional agencies charged with carrying out 

the sentences.

■ ■ ■

What would be required of

corrections under rule-of-law

sentencing?

For sentencing to be governed by the rule 

of law in the way proposed here, judges

must be offered a richer array of penal measures—noncustodial ones in particular—that

are plausible for advancing public safety, and

judges must be confident that corrections will

execute them properly. For this to happen will

require a shift in the mission of correctional

agencies and new approaches to deploying

and managing their resources. 

Enlarging the corrections 

mission 

Corrections has long focused on individuals—

using authority and force in the routine business of punishing and treating them. Thus, we

are unaccustomed to thinking about other

ways public safety might be served by the 

considerable and increasing resources of 

corrections departments. But once public

safety is understood as a condition of particular places at particular times, rather than as

an exercise of correctional authority over

some number of individuals, it is difficult to

imagine an agency of the executive branch

achieving it by confinement or “correction” 

of sentenced offenders or by “sending messages” to the not-yet convicted. 

Collaboration with naturally occurring

guardians. What might be more plausible

ways to use the authority and resources of

correctional agencies? Routine activity analysis and crime pattern theory explain crime 

as the result of a confluence of factors: a

motivated offender, a vulnerable target, and 

a place and time when guardians are absent

Sentencing & Corrections 7
or ineffective. “Guardians” in this usage are

people who have a protective relationship to 

a potential victim, people who are responsible

for or are willing to assume responsibility 

for a targeted place, and people who have 

an intimate or supervising relationship with 

the potential offender. Such guardians are

abundant in safe places. But they can also be

found in dangerous places. The most effective

police, probation, and parole officers know

how to find them and enlist their help. 

This is the line of thought that has led to 

the more complex and more intensely local

engagements that characterize problemoriented community policing. For more than

a decade, police have been learning to collaborate with “naturally occurring” guardians to

solve crime and disorder problems. Probation

and parole officers—“official guardians”—

need also to find and invoke the authority of

naturally occurring guardians of the offenders

under their supervision, of the people made

vulnerable by proximity to them, and of

places where the resulting risks arise. 

The theoretical framework for restructuring

corrections, set out here, emphasizes the

power of naturally occurring forces in the

community to create and maintain public

safety and invites corrections to form relationships with them. The framework emerged

from the authors’ work on the 1996

Wisconsin Governor’s Task Force on

Sentencing and Corrections.6 (See “The Need

To Restructure Corrections—Evidence From

a Milwaukee Neighborhood.”) 

Of course, correctional resources are for 

the most part tethered to individual offenders

by the sentences imposed, and correctional

agencies have no license to trade their statutory, offender-centered responsibilities for

place-based ones. But they can learn from 

the experiences of police departments that

have moved beyond reactive patrol, and

beyond trying to arrest more bad guys each

year, toward partnership with community 

8 Sentencing & Corrections 8 Sentencing & Corrections

A new framework for managing correctional

resources emerged from the Wisconsin

Governor’s Task Force on Sentencing and

Corrections, following hearings convened in

1996 in a Milwaukee neighborhood where public safety was in serious disrepair.* Community

representatives were clear that crimes in their

community should not go unpunished, although

they were also clear that sentences were undeservedly harsh in drug possession cases, and

they bemoaned the lack of attention paid, in

prison and upon release, to the obvious mental

health and substance abuse problems of members of their community sent there for correction. But most of all, they did not believe that

routine operation of the criminal justice system

would affect the public safety problems they felt

most acutely.

The problem at 9th

and Concordia

A police officer detailed the conditions, as he

knew them, on one street corner. At 9th and

Concordia, he reported, 94 drug arrests were

made within a 3-month period earlier in the

year. These arrests, he pointed out, were easy to

prosecute to conviction. But despite the 2-year

prison terms routinely handed down by the sentencing judges, the drug market continued to

thrive at the intersection, posing risks to the safety of all who lived nearby or had to pass through

on their way to work or school.

That the removal to prison of almost 100 felons

did not increase public safety at that street 

corner revealed the disconnect between public 

safety and corrections. It surfaced the need for

further inquiry into the nature of the problem at

that location and into the deployment of corrections resources devoted to it. Informal inquiries

after the hearing revealed that those arrested for

drug offenses at the corner returned, typically

after serving about 12 months of the 2-year 

sentences, to “supervision” of the most passive

kind by parole agents to whom they were

assigned randomly, who did not coordinate

their supervision plans, and who were 

The Need To Restructure Corrections—Evidence From a

Milwaukee Neighborhood

apparently ignorant of their respective clients’

connections to the same location.

Deployment for public safety

To the task force, a correctional agency aiming

to advance public safety at 9th and Concordia

would have to know the ecology of the threats

to safety peculiar to that place and would have

to deploy personnel and services in response,

rather than focusing on one returning offender

at a time. The task force noticed that if only one

drug felon were arrested each week, and if only

80 percent were convicted and drew the 2-year

prison sentence (with parole after 12 months),

Wisconsin would have in effect allocated 40

prison beds and 8 correctional officers to the

problem at that location. If, instead, the

Department of Corrections had hired and

deployed eight probation or parole officers 

to 9th and Concordia, it could have had one

there 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and, within

the same budget allocation, could have had

another pair working on projects to advance

public safety in the area. 

In other words, the task force realized that corrections personnel could be deployed to the

place where public safety is at risk—to

enforce sentence conditions of unpaid labor

(for example, with community groups who

were restoring abandoned houses nearby), 

to ensure active rather than passive supervision

of the offenders there, to block their slide back

into the anonymity that fosters crime, and to

help them find and keep jobs. Meanwhile, 

the $3,500 per inmate that Wisconsin spends

annually on the nutritional, health, and other

basic needs of each offender in prison could

have been spent on making habitable the afflicted neighborhood from which they came—and

to which, if imprisoned, they are sure to return.

* Wisconsin Governor’s Task Force on

Sentencing and Corrections, Final Report,

Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Law

School, 1996; reprinted in Overcrowded 

Times 7 (6) (1996): 5–17.
Sentencing & Corrections 9

to produce and maintain public safety.

Correctional agencies can also learn from

scattered, low-visibility attempts to adapt

some of the problem-solving techniques of

effective community police officers to neighborhood supervision of offenders.7

Principles for managing corrections for

public safety. From observation of various

police and corrections operations whose

design reflects analysis of the public safety

threats arising in particular places, we draw 

a half dozen principles to guide correctional

agencies embracing a public safety mission: 

■ The nature and degree of supervision of an

offender should be directly related to the risk

of harm he or she poses if unsupervised. In

other words, correctional measures should

be tailored to the gravity of the potential harm

and to the likelihood of its occurring without

those measures. Thus, for example, corrections should not devote the same kind or

quantity of resources to a petty thief (even

though the likelihood of another theft is high)

as devoted to the opportunistic burglar

(whose chance of committing another offense

may be lower but whose potential for harm 

is greater). 

■ The graver the potential harm and the 

more likely it is to occur if nothing is done 

to reduce the risk, the more active must be the

supervision when the offender is not in prison.

The nature of supervision should change as

the risk to public safety the offender presents

changes over time.

■ Alacrity, flexibility, and parsimony should

characterize responses to changes in the risks

to public safety posed by offenders under

supervision. For corrections staff in prisons

as well as in the community, both legal

authority and resources need to be configured to permit them to tailor correctional

measures to changes in offenders’ circumstances. Proper management of staff in exercising such discretionary power must also be

active and not rely on procedural formalism.

■ “Active supervision” requires that offenders

who pose a risk to public safety not be allowed

anonymity—not in the community and not in

prison. Anonymity enables them to conceal

themselves from naturally occurring agents 

of social control as well as

from correctional agents.

Active supervision is the

broad engagement of correctional staff with offenders in whatever setting they

are found, as well as with

police; other members of

offenders’ communities; and offenders’ families, neighbors, employers, friends, and enemies. This type of supervision necessitates

reorganization and a new management style

for correctional agencies, enabling them 

to replicate in large communities, where

anonymity is more the norm, the active supervision and neighborhood orientation more

often found in small communities. 

■ Active supervision also requires creative

program development in correctional agencies. Here the aim should be for every offender who poses a risk warranting supervision 

in the community to have a stable housing 

situation; to be in the labor market; and to 

be bound to a supportive network of family 

and neighbors, when possible, or to others

recruited to that role by correctional agents 

in the community. These requirements represent major challenges to conventional practice because most correctional agencies have

not developed the capacity, for example, to

create jobs and job placement services where

they are lacking. 

■ Finally, while correctional agencies committed to the public safety purpose of sentencing

need to be more active in supervising offenders and will have to seek more intensive

engagement with the communities where the

offenders are found, it is important that these

agencies not adopt strategies and programs

that conflict with the naturally occurring

forces of social control that can be found in

every neighborhood, even the most crimeridden. Active supervision requires familiarity

with the operation of those forces in the lives

of offenders and others who live and work

where correctional agents have public safety

responsibilities.

Allocating corrections resources 

More than clarity is required. The nature of

public safety also demands that any correctional agency hoping to promote it will need

to build new capacity, from the bottom up,

and will need to construct new systems to

manage that capacity and the flow of information it requires. That is because information

from the local level will be required for 

monitoring and revising deployment plans at

individual agent, regional, and State levels—

and this information should be expected to

change rapidly.

The experience of police agencies that are

grappling with the demands of problemoriented approaches makes it evident that 

victim vulnerability and public safety assets

and deficits vary greatly from place to place.

This necessitates planning and overseeing a

State’s responses to variations in its corrections investments—variations more complex,

changeable, and subtle than “caseload” or

“offender needs.” The process ought to be

grounded in information, gathered systematically and periodically, about the particular

public safety threats and the naturally occurring community capacities to contain them

found, neighborhood by neighborhood,

throughout a State. 

We know of no correctional agency that has

such capacity today. But rule-of-law sentencing would call for judges to be provided

information of this kind, and it is needed by

Sentencing & Corrections 9

correctional agencies committed to the 

public safety purpose of sentencing need 

to be more active in supervising offenders 

and will have to seek more intensive 

engagement with the communities where 

the offenders are found.
corrections to support locally oriented allocation of resources (for example, prison cells,

treatment slots, transitional housing, various

types of community supervision officers, job

training, and drug treatment programs).

Probing for specification of public safety

problems. In pursuing this issue for the

Wisconsin Governor’s Task Force on

Sentencing and Corrections, we wanted to

find out whether different communities would

nominate different public safety problems as

warranting attention. It was clear to us, and 

to the judges and other officials with whom

we worked, that a corrections department

ought not conduct a public opinion survey 

of how many prison cells are needed or what

sentence should be imposed on a particular

offender about to come before the court. It

was just as clear, however, that without systematic inquiry, the State’s policymaking apparatus was in no position to specify the nature

and patterns of public safety threats in different parts of the State, and that without such

inquiry policymakers would remain ignorant

about what, in the view of those closest to the

threats, might be done to reduce them.

In the time available to the task force, it was

possible only to conduct a survey to test the

proposition that perceptions of public safety

threats vary from one location to another

throughout the State. Variation was indeed

what the pollsters found. Survey respondents’

fears were specific to the places where they

lived, the places where they worked, the

places they visited, and the places they avoided for safety’s sake.

Categories of risks and “best practices”

for managing them. To find out what might

be done to manage place-specific public safety risks in Wisconsin, we first set out to categorize them in a way that would lend itself to

finding best practices for dealing with them.

However, no routinely gathered data were

available to categorize the kinds and degrees

of risk to public safety posed by the 32,000

felony offenders under probation and parole

supervision in Wisconsin in 1996. Nor were

such data available for the 11,000 felony

offenders then in prison or the 6,000 expected to be released to parole over the following

5 years. In the absence of these data, we

relied on focus group sessions conducted

among experienced probation and parole

staff to define behavioral categories of risk

and to estimate the number of offenders in

each category, in locations throughout the

State. From this information, a typology of

public safety risks was developed (see the

exhibit). 

For each of the 24 categories of risk in the

typology, the focus groups sketched what

would be required by “best practices” if 

public safety were the correctional objective.

Their work permitted the task force to estimate, by location, how many prison cells and

how much local confinement capacity would

be needed; how many community supervision

agents would be needed; and what drug treatment slots, jobs, and housing would have to

be made available. 

The focus groups revealed differences by

locality in the distribution of offenders’ criminal propensities and of the circumstances in

which they posed risks to public safety. They

also revealed differences in community assets

and correctional assets locally available to

contain those risks. The result was a task

force plan reflecting what best practices

would require in allocating State corrections

resources for public safety.

We then developed a computer application in

which information of the kind provided by the

focus groups was combined with data routinely gathered on related topics. This was

done so that the task force and Wisconsin’s

Department of Corrections could see how a

“bottom-up” public safety strategy might be

constructed and implemented and how variations on that strategy would affect the demand

for and deployment of correctional resources.

Legal authority for restructuring corrections. Flexibility in corrections’ response 

to change in individual offenders’ circumstances—necessary if public safety is the purpose—is incompatible with the core idea of

determinate sentencing: that the specifics of 

a sentence should be determined by the court

at the time sentence is imposed. Of course,

more than half the States are still properly

characterized as having indeterminate sentencing systems, and the flexibility public safety requires can be achieved in at least some

determinate systems. In any event, sentences

with public safety purposes, whether determinate or indeterminate as to duration, need to

be indeterminate as to content.

It was with an eye to achieving the necessary

flexibility that the Wisconsin Governor’s Task

Force asked how State law would have to be

10 Sentencing & Corrections 10 Sentencing & Corrections

Risks to Public Safety Identified in a Milwaukee

Neighborhood by Correctional Agents

Homicide Assault Sex Offense Drug Offense

“Crime of passion” Violence by intimates Child victim Chemical dependency 

Incidental/accidental Violence by strangers Situational Street-level sales

Premeditated Armed (gun) Adult victim Major dealers

Burglary Public Order Offense Fraud Theft

Opportunistic Alcohol or other drug abuse Impulsive Theft

Lifestyle/thrill Troublemaker Monetary gain Embezzlement

Armed (gun) Mentally disabled Predatory Robbery
Sentencing & Corrections 11

amended to support “best practice” in corrections management of public safety risks. 

It recommended abolishing felony probation

and creating a new form of confinement, 

one merging features of prisons with varying

degrees of liberty and obligations of the

offender in the community. This new penal

measure, “Community Confinement and

Control” (CCC), was designed to ensure substantially more supervision and control of

behavior, and also substantially more treatment, employment, and other socialization

programs than conventional probation and

even “intensive” probation ever had—but for

shorter periods. And because the task force

recognized that parole supervision often

approaches unsupervised liberty, it felt that no

felony offender sentenced to prison should be

granted parole without successfully completing some period in CCC status. It followed that

offenders sentenced to CCC would be paroled

from it, just as those sentenced to prison would

be paroled from CCC after serving at least a

brief time in that status on their way out.

There was remarkably little objection, from

any quarter, to the proposed abolition of

felony probation and to the use of CCC when

purposeful supervision in the community is

required. The desire to do away with felony

probation stemmed from a nearly universal

lack of confidence in it and from a sense 

that offenders convicted of felonies in

Wisconsin either present, at the start of their

sentence, risks too serious for conventional

probation or require very little supervision 

at all (because all that is intended is that they

fulfill a particular condition). For the latter

class of cases, the task force recommended 

a new sentence, “conditional supervision,”

which would require almost no supervisory

resources unless the condition(s) were not met.

Where does this all lead? 

Using the State of Wisconsin as an example,

we have sketched, in some detail, how public

safety would be advanced by fundamental

amendments in the mission and methods of 

a correctional agency. We went into detail to

demonstrate that it is possible to specify the

redeployment of authority and resources

required for such a change. If we are correct

about the public safety benefits of redeploying

correctional resources this way, there is little

reason not to get on with it. Rule-of-law sentencing would surely ease such a transformation but is not essential. On the other hand,

rule-of-law sentencing would be a sham if a

robust array of penal measures were not put

at the disposal of the courts, or if sentencing

judges were not provided accurate information about what penal measures are actually

available and what effects they can reasonably

be expected to have. In practice, however,

adoption of rule-of-law sentencing by the

courts would create irresistible demand for

corrections to respond with place-sensitive

redeployment of resources. In the same way,

guideline grids would likely give way to ruleof-law sentencing if correctional practice were

reformed along the lines described here.

Notes

1. For a discussion of the current debate among

community corrections practitioners about 

their mission and methods, see Dickey, Walter J.,

and Michael E. Smith, Dangerous Opportunity:

Five Futures for Community Corrections,

Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, 

Office of Justice Programs, 1999; and 

Joan Petersilia, ed., Community Corrections:

Probation, Parole, and Intermediate Sanctions,

New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

2. This paper is one of four in the first “round” 

of publications from the Executive Sessions on

Sentencing and Corrections. Together the four

offer a framework for understanding the issues

raised in the sessions. The other three papers are

Fragmentation of Sentencing and Corrections

in America, by Michael Tonry (NCJ 175721);

Reconsidering Indeterminate and Structured

Sentencing, by Michael Tonry (NCJ 175722); 

and Incorporating Restorative and Community

Justice Into American Sentencing and

Corrections, by Leena Kurki (NCJ 175723). All:

Research in Brief—Sentencing & Corrections:

Issues for the 21st Century, Washington, DC: 

U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of

Justice/Corrections Program Office, September

1999.

3. Morris, Norval, Madness and the Criminal

Law, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982:

196. 

4. Smith, Michael E., “Let Specificity, Clarity and

Parsimony of Purpose Be Our Guide,” Law and

Policy 20 (4) (October 1998).

5. Frankel, Marvin E., Criminal Sentences: Law

Without Order, New York: Hill & Wang, 1972.

6. Walter Dickey was the chair and Michael Smith

the research director of the Wisconsin Governor’s

Task Force on Sentencing and Corrections.

7. Smith, Michael E., and Walter J. Dickey, “What

If Corrections Were Serious About Public Safety?”

Corrections Management Quarterly 2 (3)

(Summer 1998): 12–30.

Sentencing & Corrections 11

Michael E. Smith is a professor of law at the

University of Wisconsin, Madison. Walter J. Dickey

is Evjue-Bascom Professor of Law at the University

of Wisconsin, Madison. Both are members of the

Executive Sessions on Sentencing and Corrections. 

This study was supported by cooperative agreement

97–MUMU–K006 between the National Institute of

Justice and the University of Minnesota.

Findings and conclusions of the research reported

here are those of the authors and do not necessarily

reflect the official position or policies of the U.S.

Department of Justice. 

The National Institute of Justice is a component

of the Office of Justice Programs, which also

includes the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the

Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Office of Juvenile

Justice and Delinquency Prevention, and the

Office for Victims of Crime.

This and other NIJ publications can be found 

at and downloaded from the NIJ Web site

(http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij).

NCJ 175724
Ronald Angelone

Director

Department of Corrections

Commonwealth of Virginia

Neal Bryant

Senator

Oregon State Senate

Harold Clarke

Director

Department of Correctional Services

State of Nevada

Cheryl Crawford

Deputy Director, Program 

Development Division

National Institute of Justice

U.S. Department of Justice

Barbara Damchik-Dykes

Project Coordinator

Executive Sessions on Sentencing 

and Corrections

Walter Dickey

Evjue-Bascom Professor of Law

University of Wisconsin 

Ronald Earle

District Attorney

Austin, Texas

Tony Fabelo

Director

Texas Criminal Justice Policy Council

Richard S. Gebelein

Superior Court Judge

Wilmington, Delaware

John Gorczyk

Commissioner

Department of Corrections

State of Vermont

Kathleen Hawk Sawyer

Director

Federal Bureau of Prisons

U.S. Department of Justice

Sally T. Hillsman

Deputy Director

National Institute of Justice

U.S. Department of Justice

Martin Horn

Secretary

Department of Corrections

Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

Susan M. Hunter

Chief, Prisons Division

National Institute of Corrections

U.S. Department of Justice 

Michael Jacobson

Professor of Law and Police Science

John Jay College of Criminal Justice

City University of New York

Leena Kurki

Research Associate 

Law School

University of Minnesota

Project Associate

Executive Sessions on Sentencing and 

Corrections 

John Larivee

Chief Executive Officer

Crime and Justice Foundation

Joe Lehman

Secretary

Department of Corrections

State of Washington

Dennis Maloney

Director

Deschutes County (Oregon) 

Department of Community Justice

Larry Meachum

Director

Corrections Program Office

Office of Justice Programs

U.S. Department of Justice

Mark H. Moore

Guggenheim Professor of Criminal

Justice Policy and Management

John F. Kennedy School of Government

Harvard University

Norval Morris

Emeritus Professor of Law and

Criminology

University of Chicago

Joan Petersilia

Professor of Criminology, 

Law and Society

School of Social Ecology

University of California, Irvine

Kay Pranis

Restorative Justice Planner

Department of Corrections

State of Minnesota

Michael Quinlan

Former Director

Federal Bureau of Prisons 

U.S. Department of Justice 

Chase Riveland

Principal

Riveland Associates

Thomas W. Ross

Superior Court Judge, 

18th Judicial District

Chair, North Carolina Sentencing 

and Policy Advisory Commission

Dora Schriro

Director

Department of Corrections

State of Missouri

Michael Smith

Professor of Law

University of Wisconsin 

Michael Sullivan

Secretary

Department of Corrections

State of Wisconsin

Morris Thigpen

Director

National Institute of Corrections

U.S. Department of Justice

Michael Tonry

Sonosky Professor of 

Law and Public Policy

University of Minnesota 

Project Director

Executive Sessions on Sentencing 

and Corrections

Jeremy Travis

Director

National Institute of Justice

U.S. Department of Justice

Reginald A. Wilkinson

Director

Department of Rehabilitation 

and Correction

State of Ohio

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12 Sentencing & Corrections 12 Sentencing & Corrections

The Executive Sessions on Sentencing and Corrections 

Convened the following distinguished panel of leaders in the fields: