PDF The Relationship Between Sentence Length, Time Served, and State Prison Population Levels
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.