Opposing ideological critiques converged with research evidence to end rehabilitation-era sentencing

Evidence

Conservatives charged that it promoted excessive leniency in sentencing and that punishment should serve the purposes of retribution and incapacitation rather than rehabilitation. Liberals attacked the potential for unfairness and discrimination in a system under which offenders committing the same crime could serve widely disparate sentences, especially when those deciding sentences (judges and parole boards) did not have to explain or justify their choices. Social science research also undermined the case for rehabilitation, demonstrating that imprisonment rarely promoted rehabilitation and that, even when it did, officials could not reliably determine which offenders had been rehabilitated. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 1910

Categorization

• XREF: Directly ties to the course’s competing values frame — retribution/incapacitation versus fairness and equality — as forces reshaping doctrine. — connects to: Rehabilitative sentencing collapsed under attacks from left, right, and empirical research. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 1910
• DEFINE: Explains indeterminate sentencing and why unexplained judicial and parole-board discretion was the target of reform.

Broader Connections

• Rehabilitative sentencing collapsed under attacks from left, right, and empirical research. #corroborates (1.00) — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 1910