The Second Chances Resource Library contains resources related to expanding release opportunities
for people in prison who are serving long sentences or have other circumstances warranting 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:
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:
Though the U.S. prison population has declined slightly over the last decade, progress toward decarceration has been exceedingly modest. Creating or expanding mechanisms for early release from prison could help accelerate the pace of decarceration. Compassionate release—early release from prison based on a serious or terminal medical condition—is the only early release mechanism available in nearly every state. This Article uses compassionate release as a case study in the possibilities and limits of early release measures as tools for decarceration in the states.
So far, decarceral reforms have largely failed to reach people convicted of violent crimes, who account for over half of the state prison population. The challenge presented by the prevalence of violent convictions is particularly acute for compassionate release. People age 55 and older, who make up a significant and growing share of people in state prisons, are the age group most likely to qualify for compassionate release. They are also the age group most likely to be incarcerated for violent convictions. This Article identifies the significant barriers that people incarcerated for violent convictions face when seeking compassionate release—even when they are not outright barred by their convictions.
This Article argues that to be effective tools for decarceration, compassionate release and other early release measures must reduce the obstacles to release for people incarcerated for violent convictions. This Article models this approach with concrete suggestions for how states can reform their compassionate release measures to reach the hardest cases.
This Essay will discuss the need for resentencing for incarcerated people who have experienced domestic violence and provide an assessment of the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act (“DVSJA”). Part I will briefly discuss the need and reasoning for resentencing for incarcerated survivors of domestic violence. Part II will provide a brief overview of the legislative history and elements of the DVSJA. Part III will examine § 60.12(1)(a), a requirement of the DVSJA which states, “at the time of the instant offense, the defendant was a victim of domestic violence subjected to substantial physical, sexual or psychological abuse inflicted by a member of the same family or household as the defendant…” Although this Article will not exhaustively critique the DVSJA, § 60.12(1)(a) deserves discussion because it brings to light the many misunderstandings the legal system has about the nature of domestic violence. The central point of Part III is that courts should refuse to narrowly interpret § 60.12(1)(a) as requiring a temporal nexus between the abuse suffered and the instant offense. Instead, courts should embrace a liberal interpretation that focuses on the long-term effects of domestic violence and the impact of residual trauma on behavior. The text of the statute, legislative intent, statutory interpretation doctrine, and social science research support this progressive interpretation of § 60.12(1)(a).
The “graying” of the United States prison system is a well-documented phenomenon that describes the aging of the population currently held in U.S. state and federal prisons. Between 2009 and 2019, as the total population of individuals detained in state and federal prison systems decreased by 11.4%, the number of people over age 55 incarcerated in state and federal correctional institutions more than doubled from 75,300 to 180,836. This is often attributed to the large number of detained individuals who are aging in place due to long sentences
and restrictive parole practices. Less well-known or well-characterized is the fact that the U.S.’s justice-involved population outside of prisons is also “graying”—that the demographics of people who are being arrested, jail detained, transferred to prisons on new criminal convictions, and monitored under community surveillance programs are also changing to include a higher proportion of seniors.