Second Chances Resource Library

Mass incarceration is so deeply entrenched, it takes tremendous energy just to get the decarceral ball rolling. But deciding how to channel this momentum once it builds can also be a real challenge. How, exactly, should we shrink, unwind, or close prisons?

This work builds on research conducted as part of the Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice’s Prison Release: Degrees of Indeterminacy (DOI) project, which examined the statutory and administrative policy frameworks that govern prison release (and thus time served) in each state, evaluated how these policies produced sizeable changes to time served in Colorado, and explored how back-end release discretion affects prison population levels across the United States. This brief summarizes the relevant findings from the DOI project and provides additional analysis of the relationship between sentence length and time served.

This brief describes the specialized needs of individuals serving long sentences, explores how prison-based programming might address those needs, describes existing programs for people serving long sentences, examines common obstacles to program access and engagement for this population, and identifies opportunities to enhance positive outcomes, both during custody and after release.

The purpose of this analysis commissioned by the Council on Criminal Justice’s Task Force on Long Sentences is to elevate the perspectives of those individuals closest to long sentences – victims and survivors of serious crime and individuals who served long sentences and their loved ones.

The analysis presented here was commissioned by the Task Force to examine the relationship between long prison sentences and public safety in one state, Illinois. The project was made possible by a partnership between the Illinois Sentencing Policy Advisory Council, CCJ, and Maxarth LLC, a data analytics firm. To examine this question, Maxarth LLC analyzed detailed arrest history data for people who were released from Illinois prisons between June 2016 and June 2019. For the 1,127 people in this release cohort who had served 10 years of more prior to release, microsimulations were created to estimate the number of arrests averted due to the individuals’ long prison terms.1 The number of arrests averted includes: (a) estimated arrests that did not happen because the person was incarcerated (incapacitation effect), (b) arrests that did not happen during a 30-month post-release tracking period because the person reduced their criminal activity (specific deterrence or rehabilitation effects), and (c) arrests that happened postrelease because the person increased their criminal behavior following their incarceration (criminogenic effect). The incapacitation effect was calculated using the length of each person’s prison stay (time served); the specific deterrence and criminogenic effects were calculated in the 30 months following each person’s release date.

This brief was commissioned by the Council on Criminal Justice’s Task Force on Long Sentences to examine how the use of long sentences in the United States compares with the sentencing practices of other countries. To the author’s knowledge, there is no existing source of comparative international data on long sentences that includes individual U.S. states and offense-specific sentences. This brief draws on the most comprehensive, publicly available data on long sentences.

The relationship between long prison sentences and public safety is complex. Although long prison sentences may be warranted in individual cases based on one or more of the varied purposes of sentencing, the imposition of such sentences on a large scale offers diminishing returns for public safety. Research consistently shows that a relatively small percentage of individuals are responsible for an outsized share of crime in their communities. But attempts to use long sentences to selectively incapacitate this population have been unable to overcome competing factors like the “replacement effect,” where the incarceration of one person leads to another individual taking their place, and the “age-crime curve,” the criminological fact that offending typically decreases with age. Since relatively few studies have focused specifically on long prison sentences, this analysis encompasses the broader literature on incarceration and crime. The report concludes with recommendations for future research.

To assess the impact of the use of long sentences of 10 or more years in the U.S., it is critical to appreciate how the interplay between the laws and administrative rules governing prison release affect the actual length of time individuals spend behind bars. Based on research conducted as part of the Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice’s Prison Release: Degrees of Indeterminacy project, this brief’s first section provides an overview of the nation’s parole and non-parole prison release systems. This overview sets up an examination of how these systems’ statutory and administrative policy frameworks influence release decisions, sentence credit awards, and the actual time individuals serve against the sentence they receive in court (i.e., the judicial maximum term). In the second section, the brief uses Colorado as a short case-study to show how one state’s back-end laws and policies affect the time individuals serve. Finally, in the concluding section, the brief points to future research and policy work on prison-release decision making including other empirical factors other than statutory and administrative frameworks that influence how much time an individual serves.

The Council on Criminal Justice’s Task Force on Long Sentences assessed the nation’s use of long prison terms and formulated recommendations to advance safety and justice. This series of charts served as a foundation for the deliberations of the group, a diverse set of experts from varied sectors of the criminal justice field and across the ideological spectrum. The data provides a different perspective on the nature and extent of long prison sentences, which the Task Force defines as a court-imposed prison term of 10 years or more, independent of the time people actually serve.

The data address three fundamental questions regarding the nature and extent of long prison sentences:

• Admissions: What are the number and share of people admitted with a long prison sentence? Admissions data show changes in the frequency with which courts impose long sentences.
• Population: What is the size of the prison population serving long sentences, and what share of the total population do these individuals represent? Prison population data, based on a snapshot of people incarcerated at a moment in time (typically at year’s end), reveal how many people behind bars are serving long sentences.
• Releases: What are the number and share of people released from prison after serving a long sentence and how much time did they actually serve? Every jurisdiction has statutes and policies such as discretionary parole and credits for good behavior that permit people to be released prior to serving their maximum sentence. Release data enable us to discern how many people are released after having served 10 or more years, independent of the upper limit of their sentences.

The Council on Criminal Justice’s Task Force on Long Sentences was composed of 16 subject-matter experts from across the country with differing views on the justice system and different life experiences—former prosecutors and current public defenders, law professors, judges, law enforcement officers, victims and survivors of crime, individuals who served long sentences, legislators, and corrections officials. This report presents the Task Force’s final recommendations:

1. Prioritize funding for violence reduction and victim and survivor services
2. Guarantee access to services for all victims and survivors of serious and violent crime
3. Reduce recidivism by addressing behavioral health needs of people serving long sentences
4. Promote accountability and enhance access to services through the enforcement of victims’ rights
5. Identify and alleviate unwarranted racial disparities in sentencing
6. Ensure that judges may consider relevant facts and circumstances when imposing long sentences
7. Decouple drug quantity from sentence lengths and restrict the use of long sentences in cases that stem from symptoms of substance use and mental health disorders
8. Ensure that sentencing enhancements based on criminal history are focused on individualized assessments of risk
9. Provide restorative justice opportunities for victims, survivors, and people serving long sentences
10. Prioritize professionalized assessments of rehabilitation and present danger to public safety in parole decision-making
11. Maximize rehabilitation by expanding earned sentence credit opportunities
12. Promote accountability and rehabilitation through selective second look opportunities
13. Provide people serving long sentences with access to rehabilitative living conditions and opportunities
14. Improve the nation’s understanding of the use of long sentences with more data, greater transparency, and a focus on clear costs and benefits