Are There Alternatives to Inappropriate Criminal Sentencing?
situations can only agitate the public into a frame of mind that presumes judges aren’t doing their job of throwing the book at the guilty where appropriate. The concept that offenders can be held accountable without it necessarily involving their exclusion from society, or held for an irrational length of time, is difficult to get across to many members of the general public. A good first step would be reforming sentencing policy to more cleanly distinguish between offenders who have performed violence in a criminal act, versus those who have only threatened violence (e.g., held a weapon), versus those who performed or threatened no violence. The severity of the sentencing and parole guidelines that follow conviction could then be just as cleanly separated to punish violent the most severely, while the nonviolent receive shorter sentences or incarceration alternatives.
