United States Sentencing Guidelines

The Federal Sentencing Guidelines are rules that set out a uniform sentencing policy for individuals and organizations convicted of felonies and serious (Class A) misdemeanors in the United States federal courts system. The Guidelines do not apply to less serious misdemeanors.

The Guidelines are the product of the United States Sentencing Commission, which was created by the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984. The Guidelines' primary goal was to alleviate sentencing disparities that research had indicated were prevalent in the existing sentencing system, and the guidelines reform was specifically intended to provide for determinate sentencing. This refers to sentencing whose actual limits are determined at the time the sentence is imposed, as opposed to indeterminate sentencing, in which a sentence with a maximum (and, perhaps, a minimum) is pronounced but the actual amount of time served in prison is determined by a parole commission or similar administrative body after the person has started serving his or her sentence. As part of the guidelines reform in 1984, parole on federal level was abolished.

The federal effort followed guidelines projects in several states, initially funded by the United States Department of Justice, and led by Jack Kress and his research team during the late 1970s. The first sentencing guidelines jurisdictions were county-wide, in Denver, Newark, Chicago and Philadelphia. Statewide guidelines systems were next established in Utah, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Michigan, Washington, and Delaware, before the federal sentencing guidelines were formally adopted in 1987. Given that the vast majority of criminal sentencing is done at the state level, the American Law Institute and the American Bar Association have each recommended such systems for all the states, and nearly half the states presently have such systems, although significant variations exist among them. For example, Minnesota's Sentencing Guidelines Commission initially sought consciously not to increase prison capacity through guidelines. That is, Minnesota assumed that the legislature should determine how much would be spent on prisons and that the sentencing commission's job was to allocate those prison beds in as rational a way as possible. The federal effort took the opposite approach. It determined how many prisons would be needed and Congress was then essentially required to fund those beds.

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